Review: Fujitsu Lifebook A6120

There's something refreshingly unpretentious about Fujitsu's line of Lifebook laptops. True, these lappies are not beauty contest winners. But what they will do is quietly seduce you with bewitching combinations of features and pumped-up specs. Thankfully, the 15.4-inch A6120 is not an exception.

As one of six new Fujitsu offerings equipped with the latest incarnation of Intel's mobile messiah (aka the Centrino 2) the Lifebook A6120 more than makes up for its dull exterior with features that will have prettier laptops quaking in their neoprene sleeves. Opposite its no frills glossy shell resides a gorgeous 15.4-inch LCD capable of brightening even the darkest depths of Mordor. Like your MacBook Air- and MacBookPro-owning friends (if you have any), you'll also get a trackpad endowed with multigesture goodness. You can even explain to them what a "chiral motion" is – in a slightly condescending tone, of course.

Battery life and performance are equally impressive. The new 2.26-GHz CPU isn't the fastest mobile processor on the block, but it more than did the job when it came to photo editing, gaming and pretty much every other benchmark we threw at it. What's more, we squeezed a respectable four and a half hours of battery life under normal usage out of A6120. The unit was even able to plow through all 158-minutes of our There Will Be Blood Blu-ray, while drinking only two-thirds of our lithium ion milkshake!

While it's not standard, ATI's Radeon HD 3470 ran the graphics show on our review unit, yielding a buttery-smooth gaming experience and Blu-ray movies that looked, well, stunning on the laptop's hi-res screen.

But in general, it was the notebook's thoughtful little extras that impressed us the most. We're all for sexy exteriors and trimming excess laptop fat, but designers and engineers seem to be forgetting that laptops are, by nature, migratory beasts, and therefore subject to all the hazards of road. With that in mind, this Lifebook includes: a shock-resistant hard drive (along with a sensor utility) to help weather those inevitable bumps and drops; a nifty little dust filter that traps airborne flotsam; and a hidden protective keyboard membrane for repelling drool, coffee or whatever other foreign liquids might find their way in between the keys.

Overall, A6120 comes in at just over 6.5 pounds (about a pound more than the MacBook Pro). So, yes, there are lighter 15-inchers out there in the wild. But again, Fujitsu more than makes up for this added weight with a multitude of useful specs, including a zippy eSATA jack, an HDMI port, an optional Blu-ray drive, four USB ports, a 250GB hard drive and 3-GBs of memory standard, as well as an integrated wireless 802.11 a/g/n card.

In fact, after playing with the Lifebook for a week, we were hard-pressed to find anything significant to complain about. Would Fujitsu be well served by spending a little more time and effort on design and shrinking down that plump chassis? Sure. But this reviewer is more than happy to overlook a 1.7-inch waistline as long as it hides enough goodies.