Fujitsu P1610/1620 - Price Cuts, Replacements?

The Fujitsu LifeBook P1610 and P1620 supplies seem to be drying up.

With all of the netbooks coming out with similar-sized 8.9″ displays and decent battery life, a lot of us have wondered what Fujitsu would do. Of course, only a few netbooks offer touchscreen / Tablet PC-style displays like Fujitsu’s P-series, but they definitely aren’t matching the performance of the P-series since Fujitsu used a normal-sized ULV CPU in there. They did have the advantage of being %50 – %75 cheaper.

Chippy over at UMPC Portal posted about some huge price cuts over in Europe with the P-series. We are talking close to $1,100 USD (around 800 Euros). That’s a big price cut and drops it down into what I would consider to be a high-end netbook range.

I’ve noticed that the P1610s and P1620s are getting harder to find at various online retailers – you can still purchase them from Fujitsu, with almost immediate shipping, but they are getting hard to get elsewhere. We saw this with the Fujitsu U810 / U1010 when it was about to be replaced. We’ve also seen some recent rumors regarding an Intel Atom-powered Fujitsu Netbook.

Is Fujitsu about to announce something new in the 8.9″ range?

Just wanted to say thanks for having posted this article. I have a 1510d, which I love. I never needed to update to the 1620, because the 1510, coming up on three years of constant duty, has held up too well for me to be able to rationalize spending money on a replacement. For two of those years, it was my main computer, despite what others wrote off as slow processing — I just hooked up an external monitor and keyboard, and all was well. With the extended battery, it’s still eminently portable.

I found your article by setting a Google Alert for the 1620, and this is the first article I’ve located expressing anticipation of an upgrade, so I thank you for your foresight. We’ll see what comes next — I’d propose something a little slimmer, with a tad more screen space, and maybe with the extended battery as standard. The fact that beyond that I can’t think of much else I’d need says a lot about how great this series of tablet (or, in Fujitsu’s terminology, “pen”) PCs has been.

I don’t think the rise of the netbook will eliminate this series. The netbooks are great, but they also seem to appeal to the majority of users for whom the 1620 and its like have long appeared to be toys, much to the bewilderment of those of us who’ve fund the 1620-style machine its own kind of workhorse. I trust that in the end there will be two groups of consumers, those ready to spend $400US on a secondary or tertiary machine for travel (or, on a budget, like for college students, as a primary machine), and those willing to pay three times as much for significant benefits, like battery life, touch-screen capability, and solid construction.

Thanks again. This article was the first I’d ever read on this site, and I’ve now added it to my RSS reader.

2 thoughts on “Fujitsu P1610/1620 – Price Cuts, Replacements?”

Suresh
August 25, 2008 at 6:39 pm
Would a sequel be called the P1630, P1630D, or P1700, P1700D or P1710? I never understood the differences.
mw
August 28, 2008 at 9:23 am
Just wanted to say thanks for having posted this article. I have a 1510d, which I love. I never needed to update to the 1620, because the 1510, coming up on three years of constant duty, has held up too well for me to be able to rationalize spending money on a replacement. For two of those years, it was my main computer, despite what others wrote off as slow processing — I just hooked up an external monitor and keyboard, and all was well. With the extended battery, it’s still eminently portable.
I found your article by setting a Google Alert for the 1620, and this is the first article I’ve located expressing anticipation of an upgrade, so I thank you for your foresight. We’ll see what comes next — I’d propose something a little slimmer, with a tad more screen space, and maybe with the extended battery as standard. The fact that beyond that I can’t think of much else I’d need says a lot about how great this series of tablet (or, in Fujitsu’s terminology, “pen”) PCs has been.
I don’t think the rise of the netbook will eliminate this series. The netbooks are great, but they also seem to appeal to the majority of users for whom the 1620 and its like have long appeared to be toys, much to the bewilderment of those of us who’ve fund the 1620-style machine its own kind of workhorse. I trust that in the end there will be two groups of consumers, those ready to spend $400US on a secondary or tertiary machine for travel (or, on a budget, like for college students, as a primary machine), and those willing to pay three times as much for significant benefits, like battery life, touch-screen capability, and solid construction.
Thanks again. This article was the first I’d ever read on this site, and I’ve now added it to my RSS reader.

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