Tiny LifeBook pen-convertible
(by Conrad H. Blickenstorfer)

Fujitsu has a long history of offering tiny little pen-enabled notebook(let)s that are intriguing alternatives to larger, heavier laptops, especially for those who spend a lot of time on the road. The latest iteration, the LifeBook P1610, is truly tiny with a footprint of just 9.15 x 6.6 inches. It's also just over an inch thick and weighs next to nothing (2.2 pounds).

Small size, however, doesn't mean dinky specs. The P1610 uses a respectable 1.2GHz Ultra Low Voltage Core Solo processor and Intel's 945GMS and Graphics Media Accelerator 950. Base RAM is half a gig, though you're better off using the sole Micro-DIMM slot for a 1GB chip. Amazingly, that's enough to run the Vista Business Edition, though you can, of course, also run standard Windows XP or the XP Tablet PC Edition 2005.

Note that the P1610, while it can be converted into a tablet slate, has a passive digitizer and not a Wacom-style active one with cursor tracking. In fact, this computer is so tiny that it simply has to make some concessions, but Fujitsu's designers tried hard to make it up to customers with nifty extra features. For example, while the display measures just 8.9 inches diagnonally, it is a rather high resolution 1280 x 768 15:9 aspect ratio LCD -- and that's a lot of pixels for such a small screen. And while the standard 3-cell battery offers only acceptable battery life in the 3+ hour range, you can replace it with a 6-cell extended battery that packs twice the punch, but adds barely anything to size and weight.

We usually don't like scaled-down keyboards, but in this day and age of thumbtype keyboards, and also given the P1600's tiny size, the 16mm key pitch is acceptable.