The Fujitsu Stylistic Q550 is a tablet PC aimed squarely at business, although its features and pricing will likely see it remain a niche product. Built around a 10.1in 1,280 x 800-pixel touchscreen panel, it combines Windows 7 Professional SP1 with Intel’s new Atom Z670 single-core CPU and a 62GB Toshiba solid-state drive. It’s a rarity with its removable battery, fingerprint scanner and SmartCard reader, but the Windows interface makes it necessary to use the supplied battery-powered touchpen.
We benchmarked the Q550 to give you an idea of its performance and although we don’t expect you’d be encoding audio or video, its UserBench Encode score of 8.55 is about as slow as anything we’ve seen. Battery life with the larger four-cell Lithium Ion battery was 3 hours 45 minutes (that’s worst case, playing video), although that pushed the weight up to 860g, up on the 680g claimed with the two-cell battery.
The single USB port, along with Wi-Fi, built-in 3.5G connectivity and HDMI output, combined with its security features, make this easily the most well-connected tablet we’ve seen, but it’s expensive. The full-blown Windows OS is both a good and bad thing — good from the perspective of integrating into a business environment, but bad in that it doesn’t function well as a touch interface. The single-core Atom CPU also doesn’t respond quickly, even to opening the most basic applications.
