Processor: 1.5GHz Intel Atom Z670
Memory: 2GB RAM
Storage: 62GB solid-state drive
Optical Drive: None
Screen: 10.1 inches (1,280×800 native
resolution)
Graphics: Integrated Intel GMA 600
Weight: 1.9 pounds
Dimensions (HWD): 0.6×10.8×7.6 inches
operating system:windows7 professional
Fujitsu Stylistic Q550 Slate PC Review
Contrary to popular belief, not all tablets are made for playing Angry Birds and watching movies. They can be quite beneficial in the business world, too. Models that deliver a full-featured OS and the ability to run real computer software programs, for instance, can expedite mobile operations for a variety of business users. A few PC manufacturers, such as HP and Acer, have taken direct aim at the business-tablet, or “slate,” market. They have introduced a few tablets operation full versions of Windows and feature sets attractive to business professionals, such as, for starters, the ability to run Windows business applications.
As we’ve watched this first round of Windows tablets emerge, one thing has become glaringly obvious: excepting a full version of Windows into tablet hardware means some clear trade-offs in performance and ease of use. Fujitsu was not deterred, however, and the company’s $729 Stylistic Q550 Slate PC does manage to up the ante for business tablets, bringing with it some interesting new features, such as a swappable battery and increased security measures. Fujitsu’s attempt at taming the awkward Windows-on-a-tablet beast is impressive. Still, this slate suffers from some of the inelegance we’ve seen on other Windows-based slates.
To run gracefully, Windows needs a strong processor and a good chunk of physical memory, and these items eat up battery power. The Stylistic Q550 Slate PC’s performance, for the most part, masters this balance of power, seeing as most functions, such as launching and working in applications, work relatively well. However, Windows’ support for touch and multi-touch finger gestures, compared with how Google’s Android operating system (OS) and Apple’s iOS handle them, is not very smooth. Overall, we found the Stylistic Q550 quite usable, but navigating it with our fingers was sometimes frustrating. Often, we just gave up and used the included stylus.
Design
The Stylistic Q550 Slate PC comes in two flavors: A $729 model that has a 30GB solid-state drive (SSD) with full-disk encryption (FDE), plus a two-cell battery, and an $849 version with a 62GB FDE-equipped SSD and a four-cell battery. (We reviewed the latter model.) The $729 model weighs in at 1.7 pounds, while the costlier unit, because of its bigger battery, is 1.9 pounds, which is a little too heavy for our liking. Holding it in one hand and navigating with the stylus (or your fingers) with the other for long periods can get uncomfortable. Still, squeezing all this functionality into a device that weighs under two pounds is an impressive feat of engineering.
Unlike the iPad and some robot tablets, the Stylistic Q550 Slate PC isn’t particularly sleek, or for that matter, stylistic. Instead, its appearance suggests durability and practicality. Though a little heavy, it’s about the same size as most other tablets with 10.1-inch screens, at just over half an inch thick and 10.8 inches wide by 7.6 inches high. As with most tablets this size, the onscreen keyboard is too wide in landscape orientation to type comfortably with just your thumbs. And unlike the iPad and several Android slates, we found the keys too narrow in portrait direction to type accurately. You probably won’t be composing the next Great American Novel on this device.
Often, we found ourselves typing or writing with the stylus. In addition to being by far the most accurate mode of navigation, the digital pen also behaves like a mouse. You can use it to click, double-click, triple-click (for selecting whole paragraphs), and drag. (A button on the side allows it to perform right-mouse-button functions, such as displaying contextual popup menus.) The tablet senses when you’re using the pen and disables the touch interface, allowing you to rest your hand on the screen.
We were particularly impressed with the accuracy—and leniency—of the recognition software that converts the pen’s handwritten text to type. It effortlessly turned even our most careless chicken scratch into editable text.
The Stylistic Q550 Slate PC’s default orientation is background, or wide view. All buttons and connections, except for the power and the docking-cradle ports, are located along the short sides. The controls, which include a hibernation toggle, an input toggle, a screen-orientation button, an application-launch button, and a wireless-radio toggle, are on one short side. Along the other are a USB port, a headphone jack, and an HDMI port.
As for what’s on the flat faces, the Stylistic Q550 has a VGA Webcam on one of the short sides of the front bezel and a 1.3-megapixel camera on the back. Also on the back are a full-size SD-card reader, a Smart Card reader, a fingerprint reader, and the swappable battery. (We’ll talk more about the last two items in a moment.)
Features.
The most useful feature in the Stylistic Q550’s specifications list, though, is its operating system: Windows 7 Professional. It allows you to run any Windows program that doesn’t require more than 2GB of physical RAM—and there aren’t many of those. We installed the entire Adobe Master Collection CS 5.5, and after adjusting the size of the page file (a.k.a. virtual memory), we were surprised at how fast most programs in the suite loaded. Photoshop and Illustrator (huge resource hogs), for example, took only a few seconds longer to load than on our 64-bit workstation.
Once the programs loaded, they ran well and were quite responsive. With only 2GB of RAM, you can’t edit huge 100MB image files or multi-gigabyte digital video files, but, then again, you wouldn’t buy a tablet for that kind of work, anyway.
Two notable features unique to the Stylistic Q550 Slate PC are the swappable battery and the fingerprint reader. A swappable battery on a tablet is highly practical for business travel, and even more so for a tablet that might get handed off among employees or from shift to shift. Although it’s not yet available as of this writing (July 2011), Fujitsu plans to release a charger that will charge two batteries simultaneously—the one in the device, plus a spare. Also, an included Battery Swap utility places the slate in hibernation, allowing you to change the battery without having to shut down the device—a very handy tool.
For those who might use their tablet with sensitive data or programs, this one is loaded with security features to restrict access to the device and your data. The fingerprint reader not only lets you log in to the device by swiping your finger over it, but the included OmniPass software also saves individual Web-site credentials, such as, say, your Web-mail or bank login info. You can then access them with your fingerprint. A little setup work is involved, but you can use the fingerprint reader to log in to virtually any site or program requiring a username and password. Plus, OmniPass saves the usernames and passwords in a retrievable database, in case you forget them.
In addition to the fingerprint reader, you can set system-level passwords via the system BIOS. And to add further layer of lockdown, you can encrypt the solid-state drive and password-protect the data on it. (The FDE feature is also set up via the BIOS.)
As of this writing, this device supports only Wi-Fi connectivity. However, Fujitsu is negotiating data plans with several major carriers, including AT&T, Sprint, and Verizon, with plans to be rolled out by September of 2011. At that time, the Stylistic Q550 Slate PC will also come with a module that allows you to switch carriers. In other words, if you travel to a location where your current carrier doesn’t offer service (or has poor service quality), the module will allow you to easily switch to another provider.
Performance
The Stylistic Q550 Slate PC runs on a 1.5GHz Intel Atom Z670 processor, which, to save battery life, is optimized to do more on less power, and it has 2GB of RAM. Compared with other Windows tablets we’ve seen, this device didn’t turn in particularly impressive scores on our performance tests. In fact, Acer’s $549.99 Iconia Tab W500, with a 1GHz AMD dual-core processor, performed better on most tests.
For example, on our iTunes Conversion Test, in which the tablet converts 11 standard MP3 test files to AAC format, the Iconia Tab W500 converted our test files in 14 minutes and 16 seconds, compared with the Stylistic Q550 Slate PC’s 15:06. Although this is a little slow for a tablet, it’s still over 3 minutes faster than most netbooks, which also use Atom processors and average 18:49 on this test.
On our Windows Media Encoder test, in which we set the tablet to render a 3-minute-and-15-second video clip to a DVD-quality format, the Stylistic Q550 Slate PC’s time was 31:09. This was substantially slower than the Iconia Tab W500 (that tablet took 23:37) and well behind the 23:46 average for netbooks. In contrast, on our Boot-Time Test, which measures the time from when we hit the power button until we have full control over the tablet, the Stylistic Q550 Slate PC’s 45.4 seconds beat the Iconia Tab W500’s 1:19 by a fair margin. (For a tablet, 15 seconds is a significant difference.) The Fujitsu model’s boot time is about average for tablets if still a lot slower than the Apple iPad 2’s 22 seconds. Bear in mind, of course, that you’re loading Windows here.
The Stylistic Q550 Slate PC held its own, compared with the Iconia Tab W500, on both our Speedtest.net Speed Test and the Battery-Rundown Test. Although these two devices were tested on different Internet connections, both tests were performed on 802.11n routers with excellent signal strength. The Stylistic Q550 Slate PC consistently turned in download speeds of around 20,000Kbps and upload speeds of over 5,000Kbps, with its best upload speed at 5,529Kbps. These numbers are faster than most tablets we’ve tested and very close to the Iconia Tab W500.
On the Battery-Rundown Test, where we play the same movie repeatedly until the device runs out of juice, the Stylistic Q550 Slate PC stopped after 5 hours and 46 minutes. This is not great for a tablet, but it’s far better than the Iconia Tab W500’s 4:21. It’s important to point out again, though, that the Fujitsu tablet allows you to change batteries, meaning that theoretically, if you have a spare battery, you can run it at least twice as long without having to connect the unit itself to a power supply.
While these numbers are good for comparison, they don’t actually rate the overall user experience. In most cases, we found most programs launched reasonably fast. Those that didn’t—programs such as Flash Professional and other huge resource hogs—performed reasonably well after they loaded.
That said, we need to reiterate: We were not impressed with the Stylistic Q550 Slate PC’s overall responsiveness to finger gestures. Simple functions, such as launching programs from the desktop or the Start menu, sometimes exercised our patience, often requiring repeated gestures and sometimes causing us to give up and resort to the stylus. Also frustrating: We found neither rhyme nor reason to this lack of responsiveness. Sometimes gestures worked fine, and at other times, the device seemed downright stubborn.
Conclusion
What makes the Stylistic Q550 Slate PC (and other tablets that run Windows) attractive is that, rather than being a mobile device with a somewhat limited feature set, it is, in effect, a full-featured PC. While navigation is not always graceful, it allows you to run most Windows business applications. We especially like the swappable battery, allowing you much longer periods of use without being tethered to a power supply—a must for business users. The fingerprint reader and FDE drive provide a higher level of security and enhanced ease of use not found on many other tablets, and the full-size SD-card reader, as opposed to a fussy MicroSD slot, makes getting data on and off of the tablet simple. Windows 7 Professional provides the necessary network support for most business environments.
Price (at time of review): $849 (mfr. est., as tested)read more
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