Fujitsu M1010

It’s a 1.1kg netbook with an 8.9” LCD screen, which isn’t glossy so it won’t be susceptible to reflection from office lights and it has a native resolution of 1024×600. It is bright and it’s useable outdoors on sunny days, as long as you are in a somewhat shaded area. It displays videos smoothly; with a battery that lasted 2hr 27min in our video rundown test and with the screen at maximum brightness, it makes for an adequate portable movie player.

With a width of 23.2cm and a depth of 17.5cm, the M1010 is small and will suit travellers and students. You can use the M1010 easily while on the road to write documents and browse the Internet at hotspots, but its 80-key, 21.2cm keyboard, despite being well laid out, is very cramped and can be tiring to type on for long periods. You do get used to its size and its keys do have good bounce-back. Put simply, if you have thin enough fingers and small enough hands, it won’t be too uncomfortable.

Its touchpad is a little more awkward – the left- and right-click buttons are placed either side of the touchpad, which itself is small and uncomfortable to use. Fujitsu has left quite a bit of space between the keyboard and the screen, which is taken up by the speakers. We would have preferred the keyboard to be installed a bit closer to the screen, sacrificing the speakers, and giving the touchpad and palm-rest more area.

Around the sides of the M1010, you will find D-Sub, Ethernet and two USB 2.0 ports, as well as an SD memory card slot and an ExpressCard slot. The inclusion of an ExpressCard slot sacrifices one USB port but gives the M1010 better expansion options than most netbooks of a similar size.

The operating system of choice for the M1010 is Windows XP Home, which is responsive when it comes to navigating menus and launching applications. Inside the M1010 is an Intel Atom N270 CPU and 1 gigabyte (GB) of RAM, so it will run most basic office applications easily and will be able to multitask to an extent.

With a conventional spinning hard drive and 1GB of RAM, the M1010 gets only slightly warm during many hours of usage, so it won’t be uncomfortable while resting on your lap. Its balance is also perfect: its screen only tilts back about 100 degrees, so it won’t fall off your lap if you take your hands off the palm rest.

The construction of the M1010 is very solid. The screen’s shell is hard and withstands a lot of bending, and the chassis is rigid and can withstand plenty of pressure, even when you press down on it over the empty SD and ExpressCard areas. The notebook’s white colour is nice, but it does tend to get dirty.

You also get a built-in webcam and easy to use webcam software, useful hotkeys for the volume level and power management mode, Bluetooth and integrated Intel graphics. By the end of our test session we grew to like the M1010 very much for its size and usability. It becomes more comfortable to use over time. While it’s priced a little higher than it should be, we think this is a good model to consider if you’re after an 8.9” netbook.