America Second

Welcome to a laptop battery specialist
of the Toshiba Laptop Battery   First post by: www.batterystores.ca

I'm typing this on a Fujitsu laptop, a full-function laptop that takes up less space on my desk than a comic book. With built-in wireless networking I can surf the Web anywhere and everywhere in my house. Finally, I can read Slate in the bathroom! The laptop is so light that I carry it with me wherever I go. Who needs a PDA with a laptop this small? There's only one problem. Fujitsu won't sell you one. Like many of the hottest laptops around, it is sold only in Japan.

There's some good news for the Japanese-at-heart gear-head who demands the best at any price. Americans can get their hands on the Libretto and on a dozen or so other hot laptops at Dynamism.com, a specialty importer that focuses on Japan-only consumer electronics. (Dynamism lent me the Libretto.) They buy the laptops in Japan, install a U.S. version of Windows, and configure them with the correct hardware drivers (sometimes a nontrivial operation—drivers for Japan-only hardware do not always work on U.S. versions of Windows), then send them to you. They'll even install a U.S. keyboard on some models (mine had one), though the normal Japanese keyboard has English characters and works fine. Their not-inconsiderable markup (about 30 percent) covers all taxes, duty, and shipping fees. If required, they'll ship your laptop to Japan and back for warranty work, and they'll even send you driver updates for free.

Dynamism's Libretto starts at $1,999. To get one in Japan you'd pay about $1,500, including tax and duty (plus travel costs). If a 30 percent markup is too much for you, there's always someone selling a Libretto on eBay. But I wouldn't go that route. International auction purchases are even less reliable than domestic ones, the driver issues can be daunting, and based on the prices I saw on some of the units for sale, I strongly doubt they come with legally licensed software.

The Libretto is not for everyone. The 10-inch 1,280-by-600 screen is amazingly bright and clear, but if you find yourself squinting at a normal laptop display this one will give you eyestrain. The keys are tight compared to a standard keyboard, and even tighter if you're used to an ergonomic keyboard. The Transmeta Crusoe microprocessor (comparable to an Intel Pentium III) runs at 800 mhz. This was fast enough, though it sometimes was too slow to display certain intensive video formats. [Note: This article was changed on Aug. 28, 2002, to correct an error of fact. The writer confused the Transmeta Crusoe microprocessor with the Intel mobile Pentium.]

I got three-plus hours out of the built-in battery such as Fujitsu FPCBP80 Battery, Fujitsu FPCBP77 Battery, Fujitsu FPCBP68 Battery, Fujitsu FPCBP63 Battery, Fujitsu FPCBP95 Battery, Fujitsu LifeBook C1320 battery, Fujitsu FPCBP115 Battery, Fujitsu LifeBook C1321 battery, Fujitsu FPCBP152 battery, Fujitsu FPCBP130 battery when doing nothing but typing, but hard-disk-intensive operations like watching movies or listening to music drained it much faster. And don't plan on watching movies on the airplane. You'll need to buy a separate DVD drive that plugs into the standard USB interface or PC-card slot—and that probably means a separate power supply and/or battery. Finally, if you hate the "eraserhead" mouse-substitute then you'll hate this one too.

What makes the Libretto so great is that it takes up very little space. At 10.5 inches wide by 6.6 inches deep, it actually sits between the keyboard and monitor of my desktop, allowing me to check mail on one machine while running Photoshop full-screen on the other. On a plane that advantage is magnified because you can use it even when the bozo in front of you has his seatback fully reclined. In fact, I'll go out on a limb and claim that without advances in speech or handwriting recognition, a laptop's footprint can't get substantially smaller than this and still remain usable. You can't get any smaller without shrinking the keyboard to the point where you can't touch-type.

Based on the number of strangers who have come up to me in cafes and left with Dynamism's URL firmly in hand, Americans will pay for small and light when it is done right. And I have seldom seen products done more right than this. I hope Fujitsu changes its mind, because I'm not buying one of these machines if I have to pay the $500 markup. But that's because I'm more American than Japanese.