My new Fujitsu U810

[warning: this post does not feature any identity related content, and it’s probably useless]

I feel for the UMPCs an unhealthy (walletwise) attraction, since the very moment they came out. In fact, if you dig in the early years of this blog you’ll see I am a gadget freak: I am still proudly going around with my JasJar, even if it means having a fanny pack around my waist for the delight of my mocking colleagues (one day I’ll give them proper grief about all the fashion mistakes they make according to Italian tastes, but that’s another story :-)).
During the black Friday I went, like many fellow geeks, in the annual pilgrimage to Fry’s. Here, among unbelievably long lines and empty shelves, I saw the U810: an exquisitely small convertible laptop, small enough to literally fit in the pockets of my jacket but with a keyboard big enough to support the parody of 3-fingers touchtyping I do. I have already seen it on engadget, but having it right there, with all the Vista icons so tiny in the 5.6″ 1024×600 WSGA Crystal View… that day the line was too long, but the day after i just had to go buy it 🙂

And here it is, shown together with my wife’s 30″ monitor:

Tiny,eh?
As soon as I got home I flattened the sad, sad Vista Basic that was on by default, for a more proper Vista Ultimate: promptly followed by Visual Studio 2008, Office, ArtRage, Live Writer, ZoomIt (especially zoomit, this thing is minuscule) Messenger, Paint.NET… you get the picture. Below there’s a screenshot of this very post, taken while I am composing it directly from the U810:

I mean, this thingy does AERO!!!
Of course this it not as fast as my Lenovo X61, but still… think what it means to have a full Vista capable machine in your pocket. At the last CardSpace team meeting this little beast was a major distraction for my fellow gadget lovers 🙂

The real test for this will come when I’ll go in vacation later in the month. It has a lot of positive things: great screen, excellent keyboard, touchscreen, bluetooth & wifi, fingerprint scanner… but it also has shortcomings. The main ones IMHO are the doubled keys (for using tab or arrows I have to press the fn key as well) and the lack of wlan, which can be pretty crippling at times.

Anyway, so far I’m super happy 🙂 next move: pairing it with the bluetooth GPS antenna and finding a decent navigation system with at least feature parity with the Windows Mobile ones!