by Galina Sudareva
11/11/2004 | 05:32 AM
Today we are going to review a Fujitsu-Siemens LifeBook S7010 BT notebook. The manufacturer positions this solution as a portable office computer for corporate needs. As is known, regular “office” notebooks feature 14”-15” LCD screen, average dimensions and weight, elegant and strict design and pretty sufficient performance for comfortable work in multimedia and office applications.
<%BANNER[article]%>Fujitsu-Siemens LifeBook S7010 BT notebook also complies with these above listed typical characteristics of the office machine. It is equipped with an Intel Pentium M 745 CPU working at the actual 1.8GHz core clock frequency, features 14-inch screen supporting maximum resolution of 1024x768, and is pretty average in terms of dimensions and weight (306 x 247 x 26-33mm, 1.7kg). Although this solution seems to be pretty compact and slim, it at the same time boasts such useful wireless interfaces as Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, which makes Fujitsu-Siemens LifeBook S7010 BT fully-mobile.
The case of Fujitsu-Siemens LifeBook S7010 BT laptop is designed from magnesium alloy of pleasant silver color, with coal-black control panel and frame around the screen. The quick-launch buttons, a couple of side covers and monitor retention mechanisms are also designed from the same silver-colored material, which makes the system look simple and elegant at the same time. All in all, this laptop looks like a stylish attribute of a contemporary businessman. With the cover closed this notebook looks more like a book, due to its strict and slim design.
At the top panel right next to the monitor retentions you can find a row of buttons, including: power button, programmable quick-launch buttons for the most frequently used applications, and Enter key. With the help of the latter and the four quick launch buttons of the Security Panel, you can set additional protection against unauthorized access, by setting up to 5 different numeric passwords, which you will then have to type in before BIOS POST test begins (well, this is a pretty nice solution for a portable “office” notebook, I should say). Also you can see two stereo speakers next to the same monitor retention clips.
The system status indicators are designed in a pretty original way: there is a small LCD panel at the side of the laptop displaying different pictograms corresponding to the power source, battery status, system activity and more. I think that the use of a display like that for this particular purpose is definitely more informative than the traditional LED indicators, we are all so much used to. But unfortunately, it is less functional this way. First of all, when the screen is closed, you can hardly see anything on this mini-screen, and there are no other indicators neither on the sides of the laptop, not on the top of it. Secondly, the pictograms are somewhat pale, and you will have hard time trying to figure out what is showing there if there is not enough light in the room for instance.
The laptop is equipped with a full-size keyboard, where only the functional keys are somewhat smaller than the rest. It is designed of light-gray plastic, which does look very stylish, but turns out not that practical at all, as it gets dirty too quickly. The keys marking, including the functional keys and the [Fn] keys are all painted dark-gray, which is not very convenient, because makes it harder to distinguish between them. Also, there is no numeric pad and no Windows keys, which we have already got used to on all our desktops.
Overall, the keyboard keys react very smoothly when pressed and leave a nice fixed feeling when you press and hold them down. The arrow keys are separated from the rest of the keys on the right side of the keyboard and are of slightly smaller size. On both sides of these keys there are PgUp/Home and PgDn/End keys, which to me personally are not very conveniently placed, because they get accidentally pressed most of the time you use the arrow keys. Otherwise, the keyboard proved to be very comfortable at work.
Also you can move the cursor of your Fujitsu-Siemens LifeBook S7010 BT with the TouchPad and TrackPoint (a tiny joystick located between the second and the third rows of keyboard keys), which replace the traditional mouse in this case. Moreover, these devices also feature two functional keys similar to the left and right mouse keys, and an additional scrolling key.
The screen at first seems very bright, with saturated color gamma. However, the first positive impression turned out to be not quite true. The level of black at the maximum brightness settings makes 3.21nit, and the level of white – 113nit, which makes the contrast level equal to 35:1. At the minimum brightness settings the level of black is 0.47nit, and the level of white – 18.0nit, making the contrast equal to 38:1, which is close to the parameters of inexpensive TN+Film matrices, which characteristic contrast value is around 50:1. The viewing angles for this monitor are quite average. The full pixel response time of this matrix is 30ms, where 20ms stand for the pixel rise and 10ms are spent for pixel fall.
So, we can state that this matrix features very high response time, not very high contrast and mediocre viewing angles. The brightness can be adjusted with the help of special functional keys, and the scale, which appears on the screen while the brightness adjustment key is pressed allows to determine the current settings and change them accordingly. The available range includes 8 different settings. Note thought that the brightness setting starts from the second grade right away. And in case you set it to the minimum, you will even be able to read with the room lights on, although it will not be too comfortable I should confess.
At the front edge of Fujitsu-Siemens LifeBook S7010 BT you can see the display lock, which prevents the top cover from flipping open unexpectedly, and the Wireless LAN/Bluetooth On/Off button.
On the left you can see the following ports and connectors:
On the right side of the laptop there are:
On the back panel of the laptop you can see:
If you turn the laptop upside down you will see the removable plastic covers for the HDD, RAM, miniPCI wireless network, and battery. Also there are quite a few ventilation slits and a special doc-station connector (replicator-port).
Note that the doc station shipped together with the Fujitsu-Siemens LifeBook S7010 BT is equipped with the following connectors and ports:
It is very convenient to use this doc-station in the office, because you don’t have to plug in and out all sorts of cables all the time, just this one doc-station. And in case you need to use your laptop on the road, you can always disconnect it, especially, since the laptop itself is not loaded with too many ports and connectors, unnecessary on a business trip. Of course, it positively affects its weight and size, which is important for a portable solution.
Summing up all the functional peculiarities of Fujitsu-Siemens LifeBook S7010 BT laptop we created this table:
The accessories bundle is not a very rich one, I should say. The laptop is supplied together with the following accessories: external power supply unit of pretty big size, telephone cable, documentation, pretty brief user’s manual, a booklet with a list of authorized service centers, a set of connectors for telephone cables of different countries (namely, France, Germany, Switzerland, England, Italy and Austria), a set of drivers and utilities, system recovery CD disk, Nero 6 CD disk and a CD with WinDVD 5 player.
The transportation bag, for some reason, was not included.
Fujitsu-Siemens LifeBook S7010 BT is based on Intel 855GME chipset and features Pentium M 745 CPU working at the actual 1.8GHz frequency (Dothan core manufactured with 0.09micron technology). It features larger 2048KB L2 cache and 400MHz system bus. It uses Fujitsu MHT2080AH hard disk drive with 80GB storage capacity, and 5,400rpm spindle rotation speed.
The laptop features two RAM DIMM slots, one already occupied by the 512GB PC2700 DDR SDRAM module (the maximum you can install into these slots is 2048MB of memory). Both DIMM slots are located at the bottom of the notebook under a special cover, which can be opened only after you remove the fastening screws.
The integrated graphics subsystem of Fujitsu-Siemens LifeBook S7010 BT laptop uses DVMT (Dynamic Video Memory Technology), so that it can acquire dynamically from 16MB up to 64MB of memory for its specific needs at any time.
The integrated sound subsystem and built-in stereo speakers are quite sufficient for the needs of the operating system, office, gaming and multimedia applications. However, the volume level appeared quite low, which was not enough for comfortable DVD playback, for instance.
The tested laptop also features a built-in DVD-RW optical drive providing 16x CD and 4x DVD reading, 8x CD and 2x DVD rewriting, and 24x CD and 8x DVD writing speeds. The current configuration comes without the built-in floppy drive.
We were very pleased to find such communication interfaces as Wi-Fi (IEEE802.11b/g) and Bluetooth, especially since they get more and more demanded in our wireless era, replacing numerous wires and cables. There is also a Broadcom Gigabit network adapter onboard.
The cooling solution is an irreplaceable part of any contemporary computer system. The solution used in Fujitsu-Siemens LifeBook S7010 BT is pretty quiet. The only thin that drew our attention was the fact that the sensor TouchPad alongside with the surrounding surface where your hands rest got pretty warm during work. During the Multimedia Content Creation Winstone 2004 benchmark we measured a few temperatures with the help of an infra-red thermometer from the most critical laptop surfaces. As a result we got the following values:
For your convenience here is a table listing all the Fujitsu-Siemens LifeBook S7010 BT laptop specifications:
The tests were run in Microsoft Windows XP HE with DirectX 9.0a installed. The network services, audio subsystem, power-saving services, antivirus software, screensavers and error messages were all disabled before the tests. We ran all benchmarks with the maximum and minimum screen brightness settings and with the maximum LCD matrix resolution (1024x768).
We used the following tests:
The benchmarks were run in two modes created by changing the power source settings. In the first case we ran the tests with the AC/DC power source, i.e. the notebook was powered constantly, which provided the maximum performance and guaranteed shortest battery run-down time. In the second case the notebook was powered only from the battery, with battery saving mode activated. In this case we got maximum battery life.
First of all we would like to share the results obtained in Business Winstone 2004 and Multimedia Content Creation Winstone 2004, since this particular notebook is primarily positioned as a comfortable solution for office and multimedia applications (as we have already mentioned above, Fujitsu-Siemens LifeBook S7010 BT is positioned as a corporate solution for office needs). These benchmarks run real applications scripts with multiple tasks being performed simultaneously. The table below sums up all the obtained results:
As you can see, this notebook performs very well here. Note that it proves better fit for multimedia applications (the results of Multimedia Content Creation Winstone 2004 are about 7% higher than those of Business Winstone). And when our laptop is running in the battery mode, the performance gets almost twice as low. Of course, it can be explained by the fact that the power-saving mode makes processor work at lower clock frequency depending on the applications running at a given moment, which allows increasing the battery life dramatically (which does matter most of all other factors, when there is no external power source around). For a better and more illustrative comparison of the results take a look at the diagram below:
In the synthetic SiSoftware Sandra 2004 and PCMark 2004 test, which server to show the performance of the entire system as well as of its individual components, Fujitsu-Siemens LifeBook S7010 BT also appears pretty efficient. Here are the results:
Well, not bad at all. The only value which strikes as kind of average is the graphics performance as measured by PCMark 2004. However, what do you expect from a laptop without a fully-fledged graphics controller? As we have already mentioned during the configuration discussion, it uses integrated graphics subsystem with 16-64MB of dynamic memory borrowed from the system RAM.
During the gaming performance tests of our Fujitsu-Siemens LifeBook S7010 BT laptop the results turned out quite OK. The video subsystem of our today’s fellow allows playing a few 3D games (which do not require DirectX 9.0 support), although only with minimum image quality settings. However, when we powered the laptop from the battery, you will hardly be able to enjoy comfortable gameplay (you can notice an evident “slide-show” effect on the screen). Of course, in this case the performance drops down a lot, as the notebook works in power-saving mode. The results obtained in 3DMark 2001 SE Pro illustrate very nicely how fast this system can be with different image quality settings applied:
In Quake3 we ran the benchmarks for two different image quality settings:
Here are the obtained results:
And in the form of a diagram:
During the tests in Unreal Tournament 2003 no wonder happened again: Fujitsu-Siemens LifeBook S7010 BT again proved to be quite a mediocre solution for gaming needs, because of the integrated graphics subsystem instead of a fully-fledged graphics controller. As always, activating the battery mode pushes the performance about 1.5 times down.
The diagram follows:
The results of the laptop battery life tests were obtained with the help of our Battery Eater Pro 2.30 benchmark. The tests were run for two different screen brightness settings: maximum and minimum. Also we used three basic test modes:
Here are the results:
With the maximum screen brightness the battery life of our Fujitsu-Siemens LifeBook S7010 BT laptop in different work modes appeared as follows:
If we reduce the screen brightness down to the minimum, we will be able to extend the battery quite tangibly. It is clearly shown on the diagram, below. You can even read with such settings without turning the lights off.
When we measured the battery life during DVD playback we decided it wouldn’t make sense to reduce the brightness to the minimum, because in this case you will not be able to enjoy the movie that much: the color gamma will be too faded, and the contrast will also change badly. So, reducing the screen brightness to the minimum results into following battery life improvements:
Well, you can significantly improve your notebook’s battery life by simply reducing the screen brightness. Maybe it is a goof thing to keep in mind while you are on the road, because a bonus life that will never be useless.
Well, Fujitsu-Siemens LifeBook S7010 BT laptop proved to be exactly what we expected it to: mobile, compact and slim, elegantly designed. It is a true powerful machine for office and multimedia needs. It is even suitable for a few games, which do not require DirectX 9.0 support.
Unfortunately, this solution is not completely flawless. Here is would like to stress a not very long lasting battery, which is important for presentations and DVD playback. Also, the LCD status bar can hardly be regarded as convenient and informative, because with the notebook top closed or when there is not enough light in the room you can barely see what’s displayed there, while other status indicators are simply absent.
Overall I have to admit that Fujitsu-Siemens LifeBook S7010 BT laptop makes a very good impression. It has every chance to be worth your attention if you are looking for a slim and light notebook mostly used in an office environment.