Fujitsu Siemens Lifebook S2110 AMD-based notebook

First UK Review Fujitsu Siemens has launched a new Lifebook notebook on the first day of CeBIT, and it’s the first model in this range to use an AMD processor. Strictly speaking, the Lifebook S2110 isn’t a new model as it has been on sale in the US for a couple of months under the Fujitsu brand. However, Fujitsu Siemens is a 50:50 joint venture between Fujitsu and Siemens, which gives the S2110 a tenuous claim to fame...

Conspiracy theorists might like to note that this year CeBIT overlaps with Intel Developer Forum so this European launch takes place while Intel’s great and good extol the virtues of Pentium M. Those same conspiracy theorists might like to note that the Lifebook S2110 was delivered to us in a box adorned with an Intel sticker.

The key features of a professional notebook are low weight, decent battery life and connectivity, while a huge screen and gaming graphics take a back seat.

On this front the S2110 delivers the goods - it weighs in at 1.9kg with the DVD-Ram drive installed. The optical drive slips into a modular drive bay which can alternatively accommodate a second battery, which on past form will cost about £110 inc VAT. We didn’t receive this accessory with the review sample so we ran our battery test on the main 5200mAh battery and got a real world battery life figure of 2h 31m. The secondary battery is a rated at 3800mAh so it's fair to speculate that this would boost the working life to 4h 20m, which is rather impressive.

In the past, AMD notebooks have suffered from questionable power management which has often been blamed on the chipset, but in this case the combination of the ATI RS482 North Bridge with ATI's own SB400 South Bridge on a Fujitsu FJNB19A motherboard gives us no cause for complaint. Although the Radeon Xpress 200M graphics support DirectX 9 with Shader Model 2.0, it's clear from the pathetic 3DMark05 score of 468 that the S2110 will be of no interest to gamers. It is, however, superb at running presentations, and although the 13.3in screen is limited to a resolution of 1,024 x 768 you can raise the resolution to 1,600 x 1,200 if you plug in an external monitor or projector. The screen is superb, but frankly we’d expect that of any 1,024 x 768 panel in this day and age as every notebook manufacturer has stack of experience with this technology and Fujitsu Siemens is no exception.