Fujitsu's convertible: Half-notebook, half tablet

The scoop: LifeBook P1500 series , by Fujitsu, starts at $1,500.

What it is: A pen-enabled convertible notebook, the P1500 series is an upgrade of Fujitsu's P1000 line of ultra-portable notebooks, with improved features and Windows XP instead of the Tablet PC operating system. The notebook features an 8.9-inch touchscreen that lets you use your fingers or any regular pointing implement to input data. (No special pens are needed, which often get lost).

The 2.2-pound notebook is powered by an Intel Pentium M Ultra Low Voltage processor (up to 1.2 GHz), has up to 1G byte of system memory (minimum of 256M bytes), a 30G- or 60G-byte hard drive, integrated 802.11a/b/g wireless LAN connectivity, and a port replicator/docking station that provides additional ports and monitor connections.

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The scoop: LifeBook P1500 series , by Fujitsu, starts at $1,500.

What it is: A pen-enabled convertible notebook, the P1500 series is an upgrade of Fujitsu's P1000 line of ultra-portable notebooks, with improved features and Windows XP instead of the Tablet PC operating system. The notebook features an 8.9-inch touchscreen that lets you use your fingers or any regular pointing implement to input data. (No special pens are needed, which often get lost).

Click to see: LifeBook

The system's regular battery provides about three to four hours of life, and the extended battery (which also juts out to provide a comfortable way to handle the notebook in slate mode) offers between seven and eight hours of life, Fujitsu says. It is packed with additional ports and interfaces, including a Compact Flash card slot, a Secure Digital card slot, two USB 2.0 ports, an RJ-11 modem port and RJ-45 Ethernet port.

The P1500 is aimed at markets such as healthcare and field force automation, and workers who spend a lot of time using forms-based processing. It is designed to be carried, meaning most data input will be done through the touchscreen and pen.

Corporations will appreciate the security features on the notebook, which include an integrated fingerprint scanner for authenticating users onto the device, and an embedded Trusted Platform Module that lets users encrypt file data.

Why it's cool: Many of the downsides of a tablet (odd operating system issues, average handwriting recognition and the specialized pen that gets lost) are eliminated through the use of the P1500's touchscreen that can be used with your finger or regular pointing device. For handwriting recognition, the system comes bundled with EverNote Plus, a note-taking application that lets you store handwritten notes, Web clips and other notes or lists, similar to the Microsoft OneNote application found on Tablet PCs.

More impressive is the bundled RitePen application, which enables handwriting recognition on any other application. For example, users can open up an Internet Explorer browser and write the URL of a Web site in longhand, and the application will convert it to text in the URL window. In our tests, we opened an instant messaging application and sent IMs by converting our handwriting into the text window.

The style, design and extremely light weight of the notebook will create oohs and ahhs around the office.

Some caveats:It is designed for workers who will use it mainly as a slate tablet, and use the touchscreen for text input, but we have to take points off for the system's tiny keyboard. Fujitsu has done an admirable job in squeezing as many keys as possible into its QWERTY keyboard, but users who do a lot of typing will feel uncomfortable with its size. This can be alleviated by connecting a USB keyboard to the system when it's docked, but that reduces mobility. Another trade-off is the lack of an optical drive on the system, which means installing applications with a CD-ROM and watching DVDs with the notebook are harder to do. Fujitsu has an optional external optical drive for the system that connects via USB port, but that becomes an extra thing to carry around if you want those features.