With the N7010, Fujitsu simultaneously enters the emerging categories of 16-inch, 16:9 aspect ratio multimedia notebooks and touch-enabled laptops.
Shaking up the traditional notebook design, the N7010 has not one, but two LCDs under the hood; its secondary 4-inch Touch Zone display doubles as both a shortcut menu and as a way to show videos and pictures. This system also sports a multi-touch trackpad capable of multi-finger gestures. But while we are fans of both displays and the Blu-ray playback experience on the N7010, you don’t get as much graphics punch as you might expect from a $1,500 notebook.
Design
Fujitsu went with a traditional black exterior on the LifeBook N7010, which gives it a more corporate look than other 16-inch notebooks on the market, but tiny metallic flakes in the cover give it some extra sparkle under the lights. Plus, some angular lines on the deck add a bit of flair. It’s fairly resistant to fingerprints, though you may want to keep a cloth handy to maintain the out-of-the-box shine.
The 15.2 x 10.9 x 1.9-inch desktop replacement is a bit on the heavy side at 7.4 pounds, but it’s not unreasonable for a system with a 16-inch screen. While it weighs 0.4 pounds less than the 16-inch Gateway MC Series, the Samsung R610-64G, by comparison, weighs only 6 pounds. Either way, while the system is light enough to tote from room to room, you’re probably not going to want to travel frequently with it.
Keyboard and Touchpad
Upon opening the lid of this notebook, you’ll find a glossy black frame surrounding its full-size keyboard. The keyboard deck has a good amount of wasted space—an inch and a half on either side. With all this room, we wonder why Fujitsu didn’t include a number pad. All the space below and above the keyboard (to accommodate the touchpad and the second display) makes the keyboard seem smaller than it is. Nevertheless, the spill-resistant keyboard provided good feedback.
The multi-touch touchpad has a slightly gritty texture to it, which we liked. We were able to configure the pad with the Synaptic drivers to respond to pinching gestures to zoom in on images and Web pages. Nestled between the right and left mouse buttons is a scrolling toggle, which we found useful for moving up and down long Web pages.
A Support button above the keyboard brings up a shortcut to Fujitsu’s support site and a diagnostic utility.
The notebook has a good number of ports: four USB, FireWire, eSATA, ExpressCard/34/54, Ethernet, VGA, and HDMI, but curiously, none is on the left side of the system; that’s reserved for the Blu-ray drive.
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