Fujitsu's Lifebook C-6659 comes complete with inbuilt Bluetooth, but the portability is somewhat compromised by a heavy carrying weight.
Desktop replacement notebooks are popular, and are seen to offer great value-for-money. Many a misguided IT department must have had this in mind when choosing to buy these notebooks for staff. The less-than-grateful staff, in turn, refuse to carry these heavyweights anywhere.
Heavy in Performance
One hopes that the Fujitsu Lifebook C-6659 never becomes a millstone around some poor employee's neck: It's far too good a machine to deserve such a fate. As a notebook that's only mobile between your desk and the meeting room, it's great. But at 3.2kg and a third of a metre long, forget about using it as an on-taxi, on-train, on-plane computer.
It stands out from other Lifebooks in two ways: It comes with built-in Bluetooth wireless networking and the CoolView panel, a hardware console for email and web shortcuts featuring a mobile phone-style blue backlight. It also has keys for controlling music CD playback that works even without booting up. Cute -- and yes, cool -- but we're not sure how useful.
Lots of AV Options
Featuring built-in, non-swappable floppy and DVD/CD-RW combo drives and varied inputs and outputs, this machine is capable of handling multimedia without breaking a sweat. For TV viewing, there's S-Video and digital audio (optical) out for connecting to AC3 decoder amps.
Generously, there's line-in audio included, for digitizing tape collections; for digital video editing, there's the IEEE 1394 (FireWire) input. A fast infra-red port rounds off the goodies.
Thanks to the hardware MPEG-2 decoder built into the integrated graphics chipset of the Intel 830MG mainboard, DVD movie playback was flawless and the sound through the built-in speakers was exemplary.
However, tough graphics jobs such a 3D gaming will bog down the system, as the graphics and main system share the same RAM. Despite the fast 1.13GHz Pentium III-M processor, our unofficial Quake 3 test only churned out a 33 frames per second score, which points to bottlenecks in notebooks with integrated graphics chips. In our benchmarks tests, the C-6659's score of 108 on the SYSMark 2001 Office Productivity Suite shows it can keep up with almost any work-related computing chore, while the BatteryMark 4.01 score of 2 hours 58 mins is only average.
Clean, Clear Screen
The bright, sharp 14.1-inch TFT LCD, 1400x1050 pixel display panel was a joy to use and had a wide viewing angle. The keyboard was also pleasant to use, with a roomy spread and satisfying 3 mm keystroke.
Of the notebook's unique Bluetooth capabilities, we found the included icon-heavy Bluetooth connection utility very pretty to look at, but a long-winded chore to use. Trying to share files with a notebook that had a TDK Bluetooth USB network adapter, we succeeded only after many wrong turns. With Bluetooth in general, software still has a long to go to catch up with hardware.
Expensive Extras
The Fujitsu Lifebook C-6659, at AU$4699, is a rather pricey proposition for the hardware on offer. For AU$700 less, the Lifebook C-6651 has most of the same AV-rich features but lacks the Bluetooth connectivity and CoolView panel, and has a plain DVD-ROM or CD-RW instead of a combo.
The Lifebook C-6659 becomes a valid buy only for those who need the built-in Bluetooth-just get it to work, then pray you don't have to mess with it again.
Fujitsu LifeBook C6659
Company: Fujitsu
Price: AU$4,699
Distributor: Selected Resellers
Phone: 1800 288 283
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