OK, I’ve had the Fujitsu P1610 Tablet PC long enough to pass on some first impressions.  First of all a little background– I am sitting in a comfortable porch swing overlooking my swimming pool in the back yard.  It is 68 degrees F. and brilliant sunshine today and I couldn’t resist taking the Fuji outside for some fresh air.  I am using the Fuji in laptop mode on a TV tray, using the small keyboard and my ThinkOutside Bluetooth mouse  Life is very good right now… 

My premiere impression of the P1610 is that Fujitsu has provided a complete Tablet PC experience.  The device feels and acts just like any other Tablet PC, except it has a touchscreen.  That touchscreen is one of the main reasons for the Tablet experience.  It has a glossy cover over the digitizer which is reminiscent of the Gateway M280 and the inking experience is very smooth.  It feels just like inking on the HP tc1100, it’s really that good.  All of my ink is smoother in appearance than on the Samsung Q1, it would be hard to tell it was inked on a touchscreen and not an active digitizer.  The included stylus is nice and thick and the nib is spring-loaded, something I’ve never seen on a plastic stylus before.  I don’t know exactly what purpose it serves but it’s the first stylus included with any device that I feel comfortable using.  Fujitsu has done an outstanding job on the digitizer and stylus

The palm rejection technology has worked flawlessly, something I would consider key to making a device with an 8.9” screen good to use.  It is too big to train yourself to keep your hand off the screen while inking as I easily did on the smaller Q1, so you must rest your hand on the screen to ink.  I was mentioning to Kevin Tofel today on a Skype call that I am actually having to retrain myself that it’s OK to put rest my hand on the screen.  Taking notes in OneNote is a real joy and I have been in slate mode over 90% of the time as a result.  The ability to interact with the UI with my fingertip is great, too.  I do find that I have to press harder than on other touchscreen devices but it doesn’t take long to get used to that.  It’s a small price to pay for no vectoring.   I have not had a single instance of vectoring while inking, and I’ve inked a lot.  Big kudos to Fujitsu for this implementation.

The keyboard is small and not everyone will like it, but I find it adequate for composing the short email and it is very good for entering passwords and the like.  The key placement is pretty good and with the 12 function keys is a complete implementation.  Fujitsu has included function key control for just about every system function you can think of and the 3 indicators complete the keyboard (caps lock; num lock; scroll lock).  I am not a fan of trackstick pointers and this one is no different, I don’t feel I have precise control over the cursor.  This one is no better nor worse than any other I’ve used, I just don’t like them.  I also find the 3 mouse buttons at the front of the keyboard are too flush with the device surface and can be hard to hit upon occasion.  I anticipate using my StowAway keyboard for extended text entry needs so I’m not too concerned.

The P1610 is about 1.5 inches thick and it feels good in the hand as a slate.  It weighs 2.2 lbs and is very comparable in weight to the Q1 so it feels good to me.  I love how the swivel screen works and the device auto-rotates the display appropriately.  It works just like the bigger tablets in that regard.  I haven’t set up the fingerprint reader yet, I haven’t had time to read about it and I don’t want it to interfere with RoboForm Pro, my most used program on my Tablet when browsing.  The fingerprint reader serves one purpose very well when I am browsing the web in portrait orientation, it is a great scroll wheel allowing scrolling in both directions.

There are six buttons along the bottom of the screen (landscape orientation), 3 of which are user programmable with a caveat.  They are pre-configured to provide page up/down, screen rotation, Fn key, CAD, and brightness control.  You can assign keys or programs to launch to 3 of them but they must be pressed while pressing the Fn key, something that is awkward to do at best.  I was hoping to program the page up/down keys to be up and down arrows respectively but it doesn’t work well with the Fn key.  What I did was install the freeware MiniScroller which serves this purpose (and much more) with aplomb, so I am happily browsing again.  Surfing the web is a joy with that 1280 x 768 resolution, in either portrait or landscape.  I usually surf in slate mode so the 1280 pixels are going down the page, making for a lot of screen real estate  It’s a great experience!

I have also enjoyed reading Stephen King’s new book, Lisey’s Story, with eReader Pro.  It’s like reading a hard back book and the experience is superb.  I downloaded eReader Pro last night and discovered a new version that finally incorporates the reader and the library into one display, so if you use eReader get the new version, it’s pretty cool..

I have not had time to experiment with speech recognition yet, but I am really looking forward to it.  Fujitsu has incorporated IntelliSonic DXEC.02 technology from Knowles Acoustics which purports to provide noise reduction, acoustic echo cancellation, and directional speech input, all from a single microphone source.  That’s right, no array microphones needed.  This should make for great speech recognition if it works.  I had a 1 hour Skype call with Kevin earlier today and according to him I sounded great.  I was outside on my porch with all the background noise that entails so I was very pleased with this results.  I’ll write up my experiences with speech recognition when I give it a go.

All in all I am pleased with the Fujitsu P1610, from the device hardware to the detailed utilities that Fujitsu has included.  There is no fluff here, everything they’ve included on the P1610 is rock solid stuff geared to make the user experience better.  I doff my hat to Fujitsu for this.  The device shipped with a pretty small AC adapter, phone cord, recovery DVD, drivers and applications disk, Bluetooth install disk (it wasn’t installed by default), OneNote 2003 disk, and the Trusted Platform Module drivers and applications.  So far I haven’t uncovered any crapware I wish to remove.  I will be continuing to share my experiences with the P1610 in future posts, and I will definitely be shooting a nice video for you bandwidth hogs.  So far I rate it a 9 out of 10, whatever that means.