Fujitsu Lifebook U2010: UMPC with kickass battery life
Getting away from the netbook and tablet PC craze, let’s go back to a time when Microsoft thought it could take over the world with tiny PCs, the Ultra-Mobile PC, or UMPC for short. Formerly known as Origami, these diminutive machines generally featured small screens, terrible processors, little memory, tiny storage, and were basically appalling to use. Fast forward a few years and let’s say hi to Fujitsu’s new UMPC, the Lifebook U2010.
It hasn’t quite hit the stores yet, but Fujitsu has managed to cram the proverbial kitchen sink into this thing. Featuring a 5.6″ LED backlit touchscreen that has a resolution of 1280×800 (!), they also threw in an Atom and a 60 gig HDD for good measure. Sure, you can only put a gig of RAM into it and that’s borderline unacceptable for Vista, but imagine what it could be like with XP or a light linux distro.
If something like this had been available years ago when I was still messing with iPAQs and Zauruses (Zaurii?), I would have ignored those completely and sent money Fujitsu’s way. It might have even hit the spot for my tablet PC desires.
The real kicker is that the standard battery (I’m guessing a 3 cell; they don’t say) will get you 5.3 hours of battery life. Read that again: 5.3. Have more money to pony up? Get a 4 cell that’s rated at over 11 hours. Holy crap! Take that, Asus. (On a side note, how far is that sucker going to stick out? It’s hard to tell from the pictures, but I’m guessing the answer is “a lot”.) That’s enough battery life to make almost every netbook and tablet PC whimper in fear. Seriously, can you imagine getting 11 hours on your netbook or tablet PC? Sure this isn’t quite the same, but with that much battery time it might not matter.
Of course, manufacturers love to overstate battery life, so we’ll have to see what it really gets. However, that’s still impressive assuming it even comes close to those numbers.
Keyboard limitations from the size and the massive bezel aside, it looks like it could be a winner.
Akihabara has more on the Fujitsu Lifebook U2010 UMPC, including pictures (check out the Japan only model — you’ll know which one).
