Fujitsu LifeBook 735Dx review

Super-corporation Fujitsu maintains several different ranges of PC products, from servers right down to LifeBooks.

Three different LifeBook ranges cover the whole scale from budget to corporate buyer, and this model is aimed at the lower end of that scale.

The 735Dx doesn't sport drop-dead looks. The most notable aspect of its design is its weight - a heavy 3.5kg when fully loaded. In fairness though, a large range of ports do sprout from different parts of the chassis, and opening up the screen reveals a decent-sized keyboard and plenty of working space.

Any favourable initial impressions turn to disappointment when you power on the 735, however. As soon as Windows 95 or NT 4 boots up - either are available preinstalled - you are confronted by a below-average dual-scan screen. Low-cost the notebook may be, but a screen is not the place to start skimping on.

Apart from the restricted viewing angle - something that's unavoidable with any DSTN screen - the 735 also suffers from a bad case of colour washout and overall dullness. Despite fiddling with the contrast and brightness controls, I couldn't get a pleasant working environment on screen. In the end, I had to make do with a washed out, semi-grey look to white space, and title bars that would change colour depending on how I was looking at them. This screen needs to be brighter, if nothing else.

The one saving grace of the screen is that it's a decent size: its 12.1 inches give you 800x600 resolution in 16-bit colour. The onboard 2Mb Trident graphics chipset is also capable of 1,024x768 resolution on an external monitor. Notebook screens actually go as large as 15.1in these days, but for this sort of outlay 12.1in is a reasonable size.

The LifeBook's keyboard is just about usable, but has its faults. Although the keyboard is nice and large, the layout of the keys leaves something to be desired; the document navigation keys are all in the top right, inconveniently clustered together. The cursor keys are rather small too, and the spacebar is slightly unresponsive, even to my hammered keystrokes. On the positive side, the Enter key is a good size, and there are two Ctrl keys present, which is always handy.

The trackpad for cursor control is rather poor. Small, slow to react, and terrible at registering double taps, its only virtue is the two buttons beneath it, which have a positive action and are well placed. If you're going to use the 735Dx at rest for any length of time, you'd be well advised to connect a mouse to the PS/2 port provided. There's even a splitter cable in the box, so you can have a keyboard connected simultaneously.

Speaking of ports, as we have already mentioned the 735Dx has quite a few. The right-hand side holds the usual audio ports, the aforementioned PS2 port, a connector for the floppy drive, a USB port and the power socket. At the rear, one large flap comes down to reveal VGA, serial, parallel and docking station ports. The latter can be accessed via a sliding flap. There's also an infra-red port here, which is thankfully of IrDA 1.1 standard, meaning that it can transmit at 4Mbits per second. Finally, on the left-hand side, there are two PC Card slots, which can house either two Type II or one Type III card. Both slots support 32-bit CardBus technology.

Compared to many other cheap laptops, the LifeBook has a trick up its sleeve - although by no means a new one - it's very modular. There are two bays, into which you can place either the floppy drive, the lithium ion battery, or the 20-speed CD-ROM. This means you can run both the floppy drive and the CD-ROM internally while on AC power, or use two batteries together for maximum mobile time. Modular notebook design is nothing new, but it's nice to see some flexibility in a budget notebook.