Fujitsu LifeBook P7120

For those who spend more time on the road than in their offices, there’s the Fujitsu LifeBook P7120. This 3.2-pound ultraportable, decked out in a satin black finish (with a metallic gray base), weighs a little over three pounds yet packs in all of the features a road warrior could want. With a TPM chip and fingerprint sensor built in, it’s a good business-minded alternative to Sony’s 2.8-pound VGN-TX650P that costs $50 less.

In order to offer such a compact design, the P7120 features a small, 10.6-inch widescreen display. It’s fine for taking notes in Word and watching DVDs up close using the built-in optical drive, but its glossy coating has a tendency to reflect ambient light, which can be particularly annoying when working with an application like Word.

You will like what you hear; the two speakers situated on either side of the notebook behind the screen create sound that’s much fuller and louder than what most ultraportables offer.

Don’t expect to edit digital video or engage in other very demanding tasks on the P7120. Beyond its small display, this laptop is limited by the performance of its 1.2-GHz Ultra-Low Voltage Pentium M 753 processor and the video adapter integrated into its Intel 915GM core logic chipset, which shares 128MB of the system’s 512MB of main memory.

The P7120’s choppy gameplay in Far Cry and low 3DMark03 score of 781 are to be expected, but a middling mark of 157 in MobileMark 2005 is a concern (13 points lower than Sony’s similarly configured ultraportable). Photoshop was noticeably sluggish when we tried to rotate a 5-MP image. A 4,200-rpm hard drive doesn’t help matters, as applications were a bit slow to load.

This ultraportable’s battery life is superb. Fitted with a six-cell high-capacity battery, the P7120 lasted 6.5 hours with the 802.11a/b/g radio switched off. That runtime dropped by more than an hour with Wi-Fi turned on, so be sure to flick that switch when you don’t need to be online.

If you’d like even more runtime, the optical drive can be replaced at any time with Fujitsu’s optional $115 six-cell modular battery, which doubles the P7120’s battery life, extending it to as long as 13 hours. The ECO button located between the keyboard and screen helps the P7120 offer the most endurance possible by automatically adjusting the screen’s brightness and shutting down unneeded components.

In addition to its drain on battery power, the Wi-Fi adapter didn’t fare very well in our performance testing. It offered a respectable 13.5 Mbps of throughput at five feet from our access point, but its data rate dropped to only 5.2 Mbps at 50 feet. On the upside, this is a tri-mode Wi-Fi radio that works with 802.11a/b/g networks, and a Bluetooth adapter is also installed.

Security-conscious buyers will love the addition of both a TPM security chip and a fingerprint sensor. If you want to use your notebook for dictation or even VoIP calls, you’ll appreciate the dual microphone array that records very clear sound. On the downside, the P7120 has a small touchpad that doesn’t match the wide aspect ratio of the screen. We found the fingerprint sensor’s location between the left and right touchpad buttons to be very convenient, but this placement makes those buttons very small.

Thanks to the widescreen aspect ratio of the display, the chassis is wide enough to support an unexpectedly roomy keyboard. Another nice touch is the PC Card Eject lever, which is placed along the front panel of the notebook. This is far more convenient than other PC Card slots, virtually all of which use a tiny retractable button placed beside the slot.

The Fujitsu LifeBook P7120 is not the best ultraportable, but its limited performance is a small sacrifice to make for road warriors looking for a secure work-and-play notebook that can last a long, long time away from an outlet.

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