When you’re looking to buy a tablet notebook, four key features should influence your decision: portability, battery performance, pen recognition and speed. Fujitsu’s Lifebook T1010 is above average in most of these areas, but you will need to be able to stomach the $2299 price tag.

Consumers in the market for a tablet laptop will be disappointed by the lack of variety available. Apart from HP, which delivered a mixed showing with the Pavilion tx2522au (FK677PA), and Toshiba, which has released the costly Portege M700 (PPM70A-0G301G), Fujitsu is the only manufacturer that releases more than one type of tablet per refresh cycle.

The Lifebook T1010 is a very attractive device, with a white cover that has a subtle silver patterned design. The 13.3in touch screen has a native resolution of 1280x800, and it displays images crisply, with great colour and contrast, but it has issues with the digital pen. Although it works accurately once calibrated, lag is a problem when using the pen to write or draw.

Physically, the Lifebook’s screen is excellent. As well as sharing the LifeBook T2010 (3.5G)’s ability to rotate clockwise and anti-clockwise, the notebook has a changing latch, which allows it to lock into place when the display is in standard or slate mode.

The T1010 comes equipped with a 2.26GHz Intel Core 2 Duo P8400 processor, 2GB of DDR3 RAM and a 250GB hard drive that spins at 5400rpm. Although its WorldBench 6 result of 84 isn’t spectacular, it means that running office programs and multitasking is easy. More hardware-intensive tasks, such as 3-D rendering, can be undertaken on this system, but they will take a long time to complete.

In our iTunes benchmarking, where we convert 53min of WAV files into 192Kbps MP3s to strain the CPU, the Fujitsu completed the task in 1min 14sec, which is what we were expecting.

Users hoping to run graphics-intensive programs will be disappointed by the slow performance of the integrated Intel GMA 4500MHD graphics adapter. With a 3DMark06 result of 876, trying play games like F.E.A.R. will generally end in disappointment.

The device isn’t overly heavy, weighing 2.4kg without the power supply or 2.8kg when bundled with it. But this still means you won’t be able to hold the tablet for extended periods of time without feeling the strain. In our worst-case scenario DVD rundown test, the battery lasted for 1hr 35min, which is an average time.

In terms of usability, the Fujitsu is comfortable and effective. The full-sized keyboard is excellent and features great bounce-back, while the traction of the touchpad helps reduce sliding.

Naturally, the Lifebook connects to more than just fingers. With 802.11n wireless and Gigabit Ethernet, networking is fast in most environments. A Bluetooth 2.1 radio is also built in to allow users with compatible devices to connect.

In terms of expansion ports, the Fujitsu is adequately covered by three USB 2.0 ports, an ExpressCard/54 slot, a 3-in-1 card reader (MS, MSPro, SD) and a D-Sub port.