Hot or not: Fujitsu's tablet touch pad

With a stylus, the LifeBook A6030's touch pad becomes a tablet.

(Credit: Michelle Thatcher/CNET Networks)

Every once in a while, a laptop comes through our Labs with an innovative new feature that has us scratching our heads. Such a feature showed up last week on the Fujitsu LifeBook A6030, a well-rounded, media-friendly 15.4-inch laptop. When we first booted up the system, we noticed the Windows Vista Tablet Input Panel hiding along the left-hand side of the screen--but the LifeBook A6030 is not a tablet PC, nor does it have a touch-screen display. Quick investigation of the A6030's case revealed a slender stylus hidden in the laptop's base, so we glanced around for an input panel of some sort. The phrase "point and write" printed on the touch pad brought us right to the source: with the stylus, the otherwise average touch pad becomes a tablet input panel. But why?

Writing neatly in such a small space is a challenge.

Paul Moore, Fujitsu's senior director of mobile product marketing, explained in an e-mail that this technology lets you jot quick notes, annotate files, touch up photos, and capture a real signature if necessary. But we found writing on such a small space required more finely tuned motor skills than we possessed. (To be fair, taking notes got easier with each try--witness the sample of our fifth attempt at writing a note, above. Getting it even this neat took tremendous concentration.) We also couldn't quite get comfortable navigating with the stylus, which moves the cursor by hovering over, rather than dragging on, the pad. Fortunately, the tablet functionality does nothing to detract from its usability as a traditional touch pad, so we were able to label it as a bonus feature that's nice to have but by no means vital.

Even as we were writing the review, though, we felt sure someone out there would be stoked to have this tablet-input option. So we turn it to you, Crave readers: do you think you'd use this point-and-write touch pad? If so, for what?

[alainassaf]

I wouldn't want to use it

I've (unfortunately) had far too much hands-on experience with a variety of tablets to evaluate them in a hospital environment, and found the hand-writing capability useless for myself. Having this on the touch pad seems like an even worse idea due to the limited space. Just my 02 cents.

[trek186]

great for students!

I'm a grad student in Finance. So while a lot of the time I am typing or using the number pad. But sometimes I need to write down mathematical formulas quickly, too quickly to do it with the math-text in MS Word. This touch pad, once refined, would be great to have on a laptop!

[broughan]

Chinese Characters

Assuming there was some sort of Chinese character identification software support, I would like to see this on more laptops. If you have ever encountered a character that spell binds you, you might know what I mean. I especially see relevance for Chinese, Japanese, and maybe Korean language students and even those native speakers who didn't bother studying enough characters.

Hey crave if you read this... let us know if it has character identification funcationality!!

[bradr14]

I'd use it!

Like the previous commenter said, this would be perfect for Asian character recognition. I would definitely be able to use this with XP/Vista's Japanese IME pad and it would be really useful for me.