Fujitsu calls its display technology “Crystal View”-we just call it amazingly bright and clear. The colors on the C2310’s 15-inch LCD are particularly well saturated, and there’s a good 140-degree viewing angle, which is nice if you want to give a presentation to a small group or share your DVD movie with a seatmate. If you’re looking for a multimedia-friendly laptop for your home or home office, this is a worth a look.
The LifeBook C2310 looks almost as good with its lid closed. Unlike a lot of other desktop replacements, the brushed silver case is not the least bit gaudy. The three-spindle design means that you get a floppy disk drive, along with a DVD burner and a large 80GB hard disk. This makes the LifeBook a good candidate for a desktop replacement system for home or office use. There is no PS/2 keyboard/mouse port, but our review system did have four USB 2.0 ports, so you can plug in a USB keyboard and mouse without having to add a hub.
But, back to that display. Fujitsu rates it at 300 nits of brightness. Most good-quality desktop LCD displays are often rated between 250 and 275 nits of light output, so you can get an idea of how bright the C2310’s screen appears. If you want to dim the display when you’re running on battery, it’s easy to do directly with a button at the top of the keyboard.
If you want to burn some home movies onto DVD or back up a lot of data, the C2310’s Super Multi DVD drive supports all three single-layer formats: DVD+/-R/RW and DVD-RAM. Fujitsu includes a nice selection of applications for this drive. These include Sonic’s RecordNow DX version 4 for burning CDs and DVD data discs, and a whole suite of Intervideo applications, including the WinDVD player, DVD Copy2, and WinDVD Creator 2 for making and burning your own video DVDs. A FireWire port makes it easy to transfer digital video from a camcorder. For digital camera owners, there’s a card slot for MemoryStick or SD Card flash media.
With a 1.6-GHz Pentium M processor, the LifeBook C2310 is fast enough for office applications, such as the included copy of Microsoft Works that we tried. With a healthy 512MB of memory, the Fujitsu notched a good MobileMark score of 168. That translates to a reaction time of about 1 second for most everyday tasks.
The LifeBook C2310 doesn’t have the fastest graphics; with the Intel 855GM embedded into the core logic set, the adapter shares system RAM instead of offering dedicated video memory. As a result, the Fujitsu turned in a low score of 1914 in our 3DMark test. Keep in mind that the 15-inch LCD is limited to a maximum resolution of 1024 x 768, standard XGA, which takes a little bit away from the Crystal View experience.
What we found most disappointing was this system’s battery life. While many Pentium M-based laptops last for 4 hours or more, we saw less than 2 hours of runtime. That’s below average for this CPU. You won’t get through a transcontinental flight on a single charge, but you will be able to get a fair amount of work done or watch one DVD. Fujitsu does offer a high-capacity battery, which has twice the standard battery’s 2,000-mAh capacity, but that adds $134 to the bottom line.
With more RAM, a larger hard disk, and a Super-Multi optical drive, the LifeBook C2310 is the most feature-rich notebook in the C2300 family, which starts at $1,499. Whichever model you choose, you’ll be getting a solid productivity machine with a fantastic view.