Appearance and thoughts
From the front, it's clear that the T4215 is not as svelte as some ultra-thin Tablet PCs. It measures 244(h) x 295(d) x 38(h) mm and, with a standard six-cell (56WHr) battery and optical drive, weighs in at just under 2.2kg. However, the two-tone colouring is pleasant enough and the build quality is more than reasonable - as it should be with a machine costing around £1,250, including VAT.
The front houses a couple of speaker grilles. These bookend the lid-release mechanism, four-in-one media-card-reader and audio sockets. Audio quality is average and, as expected, loses out when bass-heavy music is played.
The right-hand side is home to a half-height DVD-burner that's dual-layer-compatible. It's rather noisy in operation, though.
You can opt to install a second battery rather than the optical drive and - according to Fujitsu - this, together with the built-in battery, should provide up to 10 hours of mobile use. And there's a further option - the same modular bay can instead be used to house another 2.5in SATA hard drive.
On the rear, the T4215 carries a couple of USB2.0 ports, an infrared sensor and covered connectors for a modem, a VGA output and Gigabit networking.
Moving on over to the left side, there's another USB2.0 port, along with a DC power input and a switch that toggles Bluetooth on and off. There's also a regular PCMCIA slot, although we'd hoped to see a newer ExpressCard slot.
The CPU-based cooling can be clearly seen from the side-on shot of the vent.
What marks out this LifeBook from a number of similar products is the inclusion of a UMTS (Universal Mobile Telecommunications System). This supports GPRS and EDGE technologies and, if combined with HSDPA (High Speed Download Packet Access, aka 3.5G), has a maximum download speed of 1.8MBit/s on this model.
Currently, Vodafone and O2 offer HSDPA services, typically based on the use of a suitably-equipped PCMCIA or USB card, so you will need to subscribe to one of these operators to take advantage of broadband-like download speeds from the Fujitsu Siemens' embedded UMTS card.
The T4215 also features ubiquitous 802.11a/b/g WiFi and, further reinforcing its business credentials, integrated Bluetooth 2.0 as well.
On the underside - towards the rear - is a small docking connector for an optional port-replicator.
Our T4215 sample shipped with only 512MiB of DDR2 RAM, in a single module. We reckon that it's unduly stingy to ship with anything less than 1GiB these days, especially given the considerable performance boost that another 512MiB would have given for not much extra money.
In contrast, most competitors are shipping models with a minimum of 1GiB, arranged in performance-enhancing dual-channel mode. However, it's easy to gain access to the
Fujitsu Siemens' RAM for upgrading - simply remove the three holding screws and slide out the cover.
One area of concern is just how warm the underside becomes after prolonged usage. The heat can be comfortably (or, rather, uncomfortably) felt through thick denim and we measured the temperature of the chassis as being 45°C.
