Fujitsu Siemens Lifebook P7230 review

Storage is limited in the P7230 -- it comes with a paltry 60GB of disk space. After all the software's installed, you're left with approximately 37GB of memory to play with. If you're anything like us, you'll run out of room before you can say the words 'Bit' and 'Torrent'. We recommend you grab yourself an external hard drive or sign up to an online backup service.

We're glad Fujitsu Siemens has included an optical drive in the P7230, and even happier that it's modular. This means you can remove and replace it with a second battery, which is probably more useful to the vast majority of us. Unfortunately the second battery doesn't come as standard -- you'll have pay extra for it.

The P7230's most appealing feature is its built-in HSDPA module, which lets you get online over a 3G network. The SIM card slot for this is located underneath the battery, which is a tad inconvenient. If you use the same SIM for your phone as you do for the laptop, you'll be doing an awful lot of fiddling about with the battery. We'd have preferred a solution like on the Samsung Q40, where the SIM card slot is built into the side of the chassis.

There's a SIM card slot below the battery -- the HSDPA module lets you surf the Web at high speed

The P7230 comes with Bluetooth and Wi-Fi as you might expect, but there's no support for 802.11n -- only the standard 802.11b/g are supported. You should also note the fact the laptop only has two USB ports -- if you prefer to use an external mouse you only have one port left to play with.

The laptop ships with Windows Vista Business Edition, plus WinDVD 6, and has a one-year warranty.

Performance
The P7230 is slow, but that comes as no surprise to us. The 1.2GHz Core Solo CPU notched up 1,338 in PCMark 2005. If ever there was a laptop built primarily for word processing and Web surfing, this is it.

Where the laptop excels is in its battery life. It stayed active for 3 hours 37 minutes in our very strenuous Batteryeater test, which is impressive to say the least. Running less demanding applications the laptop stayed alive for nearly 5 hours.

Conclusion
The Lifebook P7230 is great, provided speed isn't a priority. It's not quite as sexy as the Vaio TZ series, but it goes about its duties commendably and as an ultraportable laptop, it's hard to fault.

Edited by Jason Jenkins
Additional editing by Kate Macefield