Fujitsu Lifebook SH771 - Strictly Business

Strictly Business

For a long time now, Fujitsu machines haven't really caught on with the mainstream consumers in this region. While they've in recent times made notable efforts in appealing to students and the younger generation with 'tasty' colors and more pocket-friendly options, the majority of Fujitsu's line-up is skewed to the corporate world. Indeed, they usually sport simple designs that don't quite grab your attention, but are still pleasing with good build and are functionally well equipped. Many of their upper-class notebooks tout "Made in Japan" status, which while definitely reassuring, it also adds to the cost of building one. These are key reasons why you would generally find them as standard issue in business organizations are a testimony for their their reliability and build too.

Now that we’ve gotten past its status in the corporate world, let’s get straight into what makes the Fujitsu Lifebook SH771 special. Sure at first glance, it just looks like any other black box, with a matte black exterior. The black magnesium alloy which the machine is made of, actually feels very good to touch and gives off a calm, sturdy and assuring feel.

Besides looking good and keeping the machine robust, the magnesium alloy is cool to the touch, while the matte (meaning smudge-free) material keeps your grip nice and tight, without needing you to have gorilla fingers (which you often need with much heavier enterprise notebooks).

The all-black machine also comes with all kinds of ports flanking its sides. You have the usual USB 2.0/3.0 ports, VGA, HDMI, RJ45, Audio jacks and even a super-slim optical drive. At the very mention of "optical drive", most peoples’ minds would automatically add a kilo or two to perceived weight of the machine. Well, at least that's the general perception these days.

Fortunately for the the Fujitsu Lifebook SH771, it’s equipped with an ultra-slim optical drive, so it's hardly a concern.In fact, it only increases the notebook's versatility to be able to read optical media anytime you need. The only caveat here is that to accommodate the optical drive, the already very light 1.4kg machine has to be a tad thicker than most other notebooks that don't sport an optical drive. Otherwise, the good thing about the notebook is that if you want it to be even lighter, all you have to do is to remove the optical drive (which can be popped out very easily) and replace it with the included "weight-saver" place-holder. This brings its weight down to an even more manageable 1.33kg,  making it even lighter than certain Ultrabooks poised to hit the market.

Another feature which stands out, and we’d like to see more often on notebooks, is the "Anytime USB Charge" feature found on the USB 2.0 port on the left of the machine. This handy feature lets you charge your smartphone (or anything that charges via USB) even when the machine is already turned off -- very useful for travelers who want to bring one less charger. The downside is that the notebook's battery life gets drained quicker, but it's a tradeoff between battery life and convenience that users should consider.

Internal Design and Features

On the Interior, the layout of the essential elements like the spill-resistant keyboard, trackpad and speakers are very similar to many other Fujitsu machines of this class. The first thing that you’d notice however, is the chiclet keys on the keyboard. Most Fujitsu machines we’ve come across so far don’t feature chiclet keyboards, but on the SH771, the implementation is close to perfect. The keys are well-spaced, while key-travel is as much as you’d expect from a notebook keyboard and the keys have a bounce that make it delightful to type on. .

The small trackpad came as a disappointment to us. We’d much prefer to have larger (and clickable) trackpads on our laptops, but Fujitsu opted to keep the fingerprint reader in between the trackpad buttons as usual. Since it's a machine built for enterprise use, we'd have to take a step back on this one and give it to Fujitsu for making this decision (the fingerprint reader can be put somewhere else though). It doesn't mean however that we like this implementation, but we suppose most corporate users would feel at home with this conventional design.

Thankfully, all is not lost. Having a puny trackpad means it can incorporate a Fujitsu signature feature - the scrollpad. It doesn’t give your machine any multi-touch powers, but it is there so that you can scroll in any direction effortlessly. Not an incredibly mind-bending feature to have, but extremely useful when you need to scroll (which is pretty often) nonetheless.

As an enterprise machine, it would be understandable if Fujitsu skimped on the speakers, but thankfully, they chose not to. The speakers here are reasonably loud, and would be useful should the user choose to use the machine for impromptu presentations. Just don’t expect to have the sound reach across a large boardroom.

Performance and Benchmarking

The Fujitsu Lifebook SH771 is a full-featured notebook built to be as thin and light as possible. However the SH771 isn’t an Ultrabook. It weighs as much and has a similar screen-size, but is equipped with a full powered mobile processor along with business-friendly features. So while it comes close to being termed as an Ultrabook, it's still a class above it, staying within the thin and light category.

Our test notebook's configuration is an Intel Core i5 2.5GHz processor and to showcase its performance, we decided to compare it against some of the better business notebooks available right now, the Lenovo Thinkpad X1 and the Toshiba Portege R830. The latter would be a tough adversary whose battery life is the best among the portable Windows business notebooks we have tested this year. Here's how the stack up in specs:-

PCMark Vantage

Scores from the PC Mark Vantage benchmark program takes a look at the machine’s performance from all angles, from processing to gaming and more. The Thinkpad’s exceptional score is boosted however, by the major advantage its SSD gave it. The Fujitsu Lifebook SH771’s scores are also slightly lower than that of the Toshiba Portege R830’s because of the faster Core i7 processor that the Toshiba sports.

With this in mind, we’d have to say the Fujitsu performed up to our expectations. With its processing power, it is adequate for most corporate uses, and you’d be hard-pressed to spot the speed differences while working on a spreadsheet. If however a Core i5 and a regular hard disk is too slow for you, the Fujitsu Lifebook SH771 does come with Core i7 and SSD options, so that you can configure your ideal number-crunching beast.

3DMark06

Our current benchmark program used to determine polygon processing power is Futuremark’s 3DMark06. While the program might be outdated, it’s still used thanks to the fact that most notebooks today do not support the higher resolutions required by the latest 3D benchmark program. However the scores here will help determine if the machine is able to crunch 3D graphics effectively.

All three machines utilise Intel’s HD 3000 integrated graphics, but processor speed and hard disk type do play a part in the final scores. This would explain the Thinkpad and Portege’s better scores even though they were using the same integrated graphics. Scores like these however show that the Fujitsu is able to keep up with the other two machines, and for simple photo and video editing, its Core i5 processor is more than adequate.

Far Cry 2

Far Cry 2 is the default gaming benchmark that we use here at HardwareZone to determine a machine's gaming cred. The higher the frame rates, the better the notebook, naturally. On the whole, the results here mirror those found in our 3DMark 06 benchmarks as expected.

Its frame rate range is consistent with the specs it sports, so we won’t be too worried about the low scores.

Battery life and Portability Index

Portability is a very important aspect of a laptop. It determines how easily you can handle your machine, or how long its battery can last till you complete your work. It can be the prettiest, the thinnest or the lightest machine out in the market, but if it can’t stay alive off the wall, long enough for you to complete your work, then it won’t be worth your time.

So to give you a gauge on how the Fujitsu Lifebook SH771 fared, we've also included the battery performance results from the Toshiba Portege R830, and the Lenovo Thinkpad X1 which are pretty similar to the SH771 in terms of form factor and specifications.

Battery Life

Our battery life test was done by playing a DVD loop with volume and brightness turned down to 50%. One of the longest lasting notebook we have had in our hands was the Toshiba Portege R830, which managed to stay alive for 281 minutes. The Fujitsu Lifebook SH771 has a slower Core i5 processor, but didn’t manage to beat this time. It did however, perform reasonably well, staying alive for a good 232 minutes, or 30 minutes longer than the Thinkpad X1.

A few factors could have contributed to this outcome. The most obvious is the difference in battery capacity (X1 has the smallest, at 38.4wh), Next, you’d have to look at the internal architecture, which also plays a large part in terms of efficiency (hence battery life). The final factor is the quality of components used. That’s not to say the Fujitsu is worse off, but rather attention to optimization could have been mitigated to other aspects of the otherwise impressive Lifebook SH771.

Power Consumption

When it came to power consumption, the ThinkPas X1 is the top performer here despite not being able to top raw battery life numbers. Like the factors mentioned above, this result could be attributed to hardware and software optimization, or even both. In fact, the ThinkPad X1 has a feature to mitigate the issues that come with a smaller battery, called the Fast Charge. The Fujitsu however, doesn’t have an equivalent, but. it does have some eco functions that help the machine consume less energy, and that is implemented on the software side of things. Still, power consumption could certainly be better optimized to to ensure the Lifebook SH771 could last a lot longer than its current standing.

Portability Index

The portability index that we have here is unique to HardwareZone, and is a mathemetical formula we use to basically conclude if it’s worth your time to carry your machine around. The lower the number, the worse off it fares in terms of portability. Generally, the chart is useful to figure out how a notebook fares against others in a similar class of products. In the chart, you will find that the top performers here have extremely light weight, and very good battery life. The new category of notebooks, the Ultrabooks are examples of such machines.

For the Fujitsu Lifebook SH771, we felt that it performed well in its category, especially when you consider that it has a built-in optical drive and a full-fledged mobile Core i5 processor, and not of the ultra-low-voltage variety found in Ultrabooks. Its portability ratio is almost on par with some of the most portable business machines in the market, including the Toshiba Portege R830. In a nutshell, we would say that the Lifebook SH771 managed well and it could have been a class leader had it not been for its high power consumption figures.

Made to Just Work

If there is a company that could make a machine that often surprises us with machines that are worth more than the sum of their parts, it would be Fujitsu. We mean it both literally and figuratively. Fujitsu has always produced personal computers that we feel are really expensive. You would often find consumers on a budget would simply skim over the specs and move on to something friendlier to their wallet.

However, once you get to use a Fujitsu, you’d then realize that they’re expensive for a reason. It won't take long to feel that these are machines that have been very well put together (made in Japan after all). Design-wise, they’d often leave us wanting but when it comes to a good business machine, Fujitsu knows what they’re doing. For business machines, design is meant to distract and attract users to a less than optimal machine, hence, Fujitsu probably made the decision to focus more on what is important - usability.

Using the Fujitsu Lifebook SH771 was a pleasure. Its matte black exterior is strictly utilitarian, and not flashy by any means. Its purpose is to make sure it looks presentable at all times without any oily smudges despite heavy handling of the notebook. Together with its utilitarian look, is also the complete collection of ports you’d need in a corporate environment, including a built-in optical drive which you can easily swap out to save yet another 100 grams to its total weight.

The chiclet keyboard is also something we enjoyed using a lot. The keys are spaced enough for some very comfortable typing, while key-travel is good enough for you to have that important tactile feel for typists. While we’re disappointed with the tiny trackpad, the circular scroll pad on the side makes up for it.

In terms of battery life, it’s not the machine with the most uptime, but it is among some of the best performing machines we’ve seen so far. Its battery life of 232 minutes, or almost four hours while playing a video loop is good enough for a movie session or two off the wall. For all out raw performance, you can count on the machine's full fledged mobile processor for all types of business uses, from spreadsheets to powerpoint presentations to rich multimedia presentations, thanks to its Sandy Bridge processor and its integrated graphics.

Ultimately, our conclusion of the Fujitsu Lifebook SH771 is a good one. It has got several things right, such as design and portability, but it’s also got certain things that could be improved upon. Things like a bigger clickable trackpad, and a price point that is much higher than competitors. While it might note stand out in its price point,  we’re pretty sure that most corporate users (the SH771’s intended audience) wouldn’t need to shell out from their own pocket for one of these sleek machines. If you are a home user in need of a very robust, business-like machine that is also very light, and full-featured, please do yourself a favor and test drive the Fujitsu Lifebook SH771. Its pricey, but quality always is.

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