Fujitsu Siemens LifeBook S2110 laptop review

Fujitsu Siemens may not be the first company you think of when deciding on an ultraportable notebook, but perhaps you should

29 May 2006 0:00 GMT / By Stephen Patrick

Fujitsu Siemens may not be the first company you think of when deciding on an ultraportable notebook but in recent months, the company has stepped up its game and released a number of interesting machines.

The styling of the S2110 plays into the sombre black and grey of most Fujitsu Siemens machines but with an overall weight of 1.9kg, it’s light enough to carry with you without being a burden. Considering the machine also comes with a built-in DVD rewriter, you won’t need to make sacrifices.

The casing is well built and we didn’t find any weak spots, which is always a sign of reliability for an ultraportable. The body is square in shape, which leaves plenty of room for a decent sized keyboard, as well as palm-rests, and it’s a comfortable machine to use.

Naturally, you don’t get a full-size screen but the 13.3-inch panel is becoming the mobile workers favourite size as it’s light but offers plenty of space to view documents. The only drawback of this panel is the lack of a Super-TFT screen and the rather low, by modern standards, 1024 x 768-pixel resolution.

As with almost all ultraportables, don’t come to this machine expecting great graphics. An ATi Radeon Xpress 200M graphics adapter handles things, which is more than adequate for running PowerPoint presentations and multimedia slideshows but it won’t handle anything too taxing.

A trend that is becoming increasingly popular with manufacturers is the use of AMD Turion processors in lightweight machines. This is a 64-bit chip, so you’ll find plenty of performance to be had. In this case, Turion 64 MT-34 (1.8GHz) handles things and with 512MB of memory in support, we found enough performance for most tasks.

Turion, like Intel’s mobile chips, is designed to save battery life as well as offer performance and in the case of the S2110 is certainly did. We managed to use this notebook for well over four hours before needing to re-charge. It may not be all day computing but its adequate for most needs.

To keep roaming office workers happy the S2110 has 802.11a/b/g Wi-Fi. Rather than Gigabit Ethernet, the S2110 has a slower 10/100 Ethernet adapter for connection to fixed networks. Connectivity is boosted with the inclusion of three USB ports, Firewire and a VGA-out socket.

Worth mentioning is the warranty on this notebook, as Fujitsu Siemens ships it with a standard 3 year Collect and Return service. You’ll need to pay extra for overseas repairs but if you only travel in this country this warranty can save you upwards of £100-a-year.

Verdict

With a powerful processor and a great battery life, this is a lightweight notebook at a great price. There are a couple of tricks missing with this notebook, such as the low-resolution screen and entry-level graphics, which stop it just short of a Hot Product rating. However, in every other respect this is a powerful and highly portable notebook, which we found a pleasure to use.

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Review Recap

Made by: Fujitsu-Siemens
Price as reviewed: £1291
The good: Portable, powerful
The bad: Standard TFT
Quick verdict: Its lightweight finish and use of AMD Turion gives it plenty of performance, and we were even quietly surprised by its battery life
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