Fujitsu p7010d first impressions - and the ergonomics of smalll

First impressions:

1. Great screeen - its very bright
2. Too bad it doesn’t go all the way to the edge - missing an opportunity here.
3. The keyboard is solid and feels great
4. It’s a little small for my hands, but acceptable. Will be trying it out.
5. Horrible idea to make the comma and period half-size. And this is half size of an already small keyboard. These are important keys that need to be normal sized (at least equal to the other keys).
6. Smaller keyboard nit - no page up or down dedicated keys (arrows double up).
7. Doesn’t look nearly as nice as the PowerBooks or the books. Its saving grace is that it is mostly black (would be better if it were all black). In particular, the hinges are really big and silver.
8. It looks thicker than it really is because of the silver highlights all the way around.
9. Another io problem - there is a useless middle button between the left and write mouse buttons below the touchpad. This greatly increases the distance your thumb has to travel to go from left to right-clicking. Something that you can get used to, but something you shouldn’t have to be used to. (could be worse - you could only get one button like on the macs)

Is the keyboard too small for my hands? This is a very important question as I use this computer over the next 15 days (the max before Fry's gets it back). Right now I’m leaning toward ‘yes’, but that is to be expected. It's possible that that combined with the very small screen will make me reconsider. What does it mean to be too small? One normally thinks of pinched hands. But your hands also have to be very close together. I notice that my thumbs brush each other quite frequently. The other measure is how far out of natural the keyboard forces your hands. Certainly they are forced slightly more out of normal than with a regular keyboard. Would I want to write a novel on this thing? Not at the moment. But then I’ve always wanted to try the happy hacker keyboard. One more thought on the small size of the keyboard - the ergonomics of pulling the thumb down and clicking with it means that the left mouse button on the lifebook is too far to the left - my left thumb ‘overshoots’ and to correct this my hands move much further out of position than on the i7k. Does this mean that I’m stuck with 15” laptops? Could be, which could also be a good thing because they cost a lot less and have a bigger screen anyway. J

Feature wise this computer is everything you could want - its small and snappy. Just about the only bell (or is it whistle?) that you might miss is Bluetooth. Something that you wouldn’t expect but would like is the CF card reader. Of course this is perhaps the only thing you might use the PCMCIA slot for, so the utility is negligible unless you have another use for the pc card slot. But to have a dedicated eject button for the CF card is actually really nice, rather than having to eject a pc card and then remove the cf card from that...

Including sales tax and a recycling fee, this computer cost me $2000 from Fry’s. This is too expensive, as NewEgg has them for almost $500 less. The only reason to buy it from there is that they have a reasonable return policy - new egg has no return policy. And I'm really not sure if I want this computer.

On the way over I looked at the Ameritech at Staples. Good keyboard and very inexpensive, but it's white. Perhaps I should give up my ‘small black device’ fetish? Or perhaps I should hold out for a 14” + black device? I wish I would have thought ahead and brough never winter with me - then I could be doing something useful here at Starbucks.

Speaking of which I think its ridiculous that they charge a monthly fee for wifi access here. The service is all but free to the business and its crazy to charge more. They charge $20/month!

Interestingly fujitsu installed the google toolbar by default. Haha.