Technofile: Laptop PCs can be both a blessing and a curse. On the one hand they mean you can carry around your work and, often, your life, in one easy package. On the other, you still have to carry them.
What most laptop makers rarely factor in is the portability of their products. They either don't make them small enough, thinking we really do need the same sized screen as a desktop machine (anything from 15in upwards), when we don't. They almost never realise that we're probably going to have to open the thing on a crowded commuter train to find the right e-mail with the address of the meeting we're already late for.
Or they assume we'll only ever be a couple of hours away from plugging it into a wall socket - when in reality we are constantly forgetting to recharge the battery, and the thing fails on us just as we show the boss the bold new strategy we've been working on all night. And they are happy to give us a machine that will take a lot of accessories, forgetting we'll actually have to carry them.
Fujitsu Siemens has a dinky laptop package which may well make being truly mobile an easier way of life. Their P-series ultra-portable notebooks often draw admiring comments - they obviously have some talented industrial designers on their team. And their diminutive size means that the person in front of you on the plane is unlikely to crack the screen when they put back their seat.
One of the most recent models, the Pentium M-based Lifebook P7010, sports a 1.1GHz ultra-low-voltage chip, meaning it can run longer between charges. It also has one of crispest LCD screens on the market, and is similar to that on a lot of recent Sony laptops, although Fujitsu-Siemens calls the technology Crystal View rather than X-Black.
And you will be hard-pressed to find a portable which packs this much punch in the hardware stakes. It bristles with gadgets, including a CD-RW/ DVD-ROM combo drive, slots for the three main types of flash memory cards (very handy when you need to transfer pictures from a phone or data from a PDA), and it also has 802.11b/g wireless networking.
It also features an impressive array of inputs, including VGA, S-Video out, 10/100 Ethernet, two USB 2.0 and one FireWire, audio ports, a Type II PC Card slot, a CompactFlash slot, modem port, and an SD card/ Memory Stick slot. The basic model should come in under €2,000, but upgrade options are available, such as an 80GB hard disk and 512MB of Ram.
First impressions of the P7010 are that it is amazingly small, half-way between A4 and A5. That makes the keyboard a tad shrunken, but typing is no different than on a bigger machine, and the screen is sharp enough to compensate for its smaller size.
Small laptops tend to get very hot (anyone with an Apple Powerbook will be nodding at this point). The Lifebook addresses this by putting the normally noisy fan into a wire mesh hinge at the back, meaning the P7010 stays much cooler than average.
Included software isn't fantastic; it comes with Windows XP Professional and a handful of supporting programmes like Adobe Acrobat, but then this is more about packing maximum portability into a machine than software power.
Battery life is where the Lifebook truly comes into its own. It sports an impressive five hours-plus running time and with the ability to "hot-swap" a second battery to replace the CD drive, you will get more than 10 hours out of it. The internal bay has a third use: it will take a hollow module to bring the P7010's weight down - something your back will thank you for.
But there is one Achilles' heel in this powerful companion. There is no integrated Bluetooth or infrared, a really disappointing oversight given that this is exactly the kind of feature a mobile user wants, especially when syncing with PDAs and phones, or accessing the net via a phone. Looks like you may need to lug around one more cable after all.
