Product Reviews

Fujitsu Siemens has proved itself to be at the forefront of notebook technology recently, and its versatile B-series chassis seems to be the ideal testing ground. Last month it gave us our first look at a Bluetooth-enabled notebook (previewed issue 81, p144), but the battery life was disappointing, as was the performance with just a Celeron/500 at the core. So it comes as a pleasant footnote that Fujitsu Siemens has updated the processor to Intel's Ultra Low Voltage Pentium III/600 chip.

Not only is this a faster processor, but its power consumption also provides a vast improvement in battery life. In fact, with SpeedStep enabled, it consumes less than 1V. When running at full speed, the battery lasted for 72 minutes - 17 minutes longer than before, and this went up to an extra 29 minutes with SpeedStep enabled.

Fujitsu Siemens has produced its own power management applet, which gives you a simple way of choosing the power settings on battery or mains power. In this case the chip runs at 300MHz with SpeedStep enabled, and this allows the chip to run on just 0.975V, but even 300MHz should be enough for all the usual notebook tasks.

It's also worth bearing in mind that the PC Pro rundown test involves hard disk-intensive scripting, so this will translate to at least two hours away from the mains. More importantly, it achieves this battery life without a large protruding battery pack distorting its shape.

This all looks good until you compare it to other ultra portables on the market. Yes, it's a worthwhile improvement on the Mobile Celeron/500's battery life, but the NEC Versa UltraLite (reviewed issue 81, p146) lasted for 154 minutes under our test with its power-saving Transmeta Crusoe processor and screen-mounted second battery. This is almost twice as long as the B-2545 and, although it's substantially slower, the NEC is the prime candidate if you want longer

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battery life.

With an overall 2D benchmark score of 1.87 the B-2545 isn't going to rival HP or IBM's 1GHz speed kings (reviewed p153 and p154), but it's still ahead of expectations for a simple 600MHz chip, and this is all you need on a notebook built with portability in mind. In particular, the graphics score has escalated from 1.58 to 2.76, which can be attributed to the addition of an extra 64Mb of RAM plus the faster processor.

Having 128Mb of RAM is an improvement on the 64Mb supplied with the last pre-production unit, although it consumes your only SODIMM socket so you won't be able to upgrade any further without throwing your original RAM away. However, 128Mb is the perfect amount for most notebook tasks.

So, the performance and battery life have both been addressed, which just leaves the heat dissipation as a possible drawback. You would expect the heat generation from a low-voltage chip to be lower, but unfortunately it still gets very hot on your lap after a while.

The other thing to take into account is that this particular sample didn't include the Bluetooth transmitter and receiver; these are going to be included in the B-2547 model. This will no doubt have a further impact on battery life if switched on and will also increase the weight slightly on the finished model.

At 1.3kg, the B-2545 is incredibly light for the power and versatility on offer. Not only is it a good performer, but you've also got two PC Card slots on the left for peripheral add-ons, as well as two USB ports on the right. What's more, you've got 10/100BaseTX networking and a V.90 modem already on board plus a VGA-out, giving you all the basic requirements.

Even the port replicator adds only 0.3kg to the weight and gives you access to the old serial, parallel and PS/2 ports as well as passthroughs for the VGA and RJ-45 outputs and an external floppy drive connector.

The B-2545 has a gorgeous silver chassis, and a well-lit touchscreen protected by a magnesium alloy lid. It's well built and designed, attractive, light and versatile too. With the addition of a Pentium III/600 processor, it's also a strong performer. The only remaining issue is battery life, which although vastly improved with the Ultra Low Voltage processor, is still a fair way behind the 127 minutes it took for the Pentium III/650-based Sony VAIO PCG-SR21K (reviewed issue 81, p149) to run flat. All of this could add up to a hefty fee though, so hopefully it will be sensibly priced.