The Fujitsu Lifebook S904 Touch is a compact wedge-shaped laptop with a 13.3-inch touchscreen and a huge 2, 560 x 1,440 resolution. While the S904 will not win any awards for thinness or exciting appearance, it is solid and comfortable to use and weighs just 1.5kg.
The Lifebook, in a way geared towards business, has some features you won’t find on a regular laptop, including Windows 8.1 Pro, a fingerprint scanner, and a smart card slot, which can be used for extra security when you log in, as well as a 3G SIM slot that makes it easy to take advantage of mobile broadband services.
The keyboard is a standard Chiclet style subject, with shallow, flat, and spaced keys. They are surprisingly comfortable to use: well-spaced to type accurately and easy to use, without brushing the centrally located touchpad. We would have liked to travel a little more, but this is more a matter of personal preference than anything else. The touchpad is slightly recessed, with marked areas of buttons on the touch-sensitive surface. It is a bit small, but its size is appropriate, given the position and size of the keyboard and the soft and comfortable wrist rest.
The laptop’s 13.3-inch high-resolution screen did well in our contrast test, with our calibrator measuring its contrast ratio at 923: 1 and its black level at a reasonable level of 00.33cd / m2. Laptop screens typically have lower color reproduction than their desktop colleagues, but we were delighted to find that the screen was measured as capable of displaying 91.7 percent of the sRGB color gamut. The screen has a glossy finish, but is not as reflective as some, making it much easier to avoid reflections in light or dark lighting conditions. The glossy finish also gives a rich and vibrant feel to the colors and we were delighted to find that Windows 8.1 handled 2, 560 × 1,440 resolution, with fonts and icons clearly visible. Only when we open a command-line window,
The processor is a 2.3GHz Intel Core i5-4200U. This dual-core model scored 47 reasonable points in our application benchmarks. It is more than powerful enough to run all the latest applications smoothly. Likewise, 8 GB of RAM is enough to run Windows and most desktop applications, in addition to having enough memory for virtual machines or editing photos or videos in bulk.
The Intel HD Graphics 4400 on the chip is not really designed for gaming: there are other lightweight and more suitable laptops available if that’s your backpack. However, the laptop achieved a frame rate of 17.8 fps at Dirt Showdown with a resolution of 1,280 x 720 and high quality. When we reduced the quality to ultra-low, we got a smooth frame rate of 35.9 fps. You will be able to play most 3D games in the lowest settings, but don’t expect to play the latest titles in all their glory. If you want to connect a second screen or connect to a large screen for presentations or watching movies, you’re in luck: the laptop has HDMI, mini DisplayPort, and VGA outputs, making it easy to connect almost anything.
Where the Lifebook really stands out is in battery life. In our lightweight test, the S904 continued for 14 hours and 17 minutes. Again, this makes it ideal for business users, who typically don’t have the most demanding power or processor requirements, but need to make sure that their laptop will last a full day and longer when out of the office. Likewise, long battery life is great for a personal laptop if you spend a lot of time away from home.
The Lifebook has only three USB ports, but all are USB3. There is a Gigabit Ethernet port and the usual 3 mm headphone port. The built-in speaker is quite clear, but it is high-pitched, with minimal bass reproduction. It is good for watching a little video online or listening to spoken word content, but too small for music.
We were delighted to find that the laptop had an integrated dual-band 802.11ac wireless adapter which, along with integrated support for mobile broadband, makes the Lifebook a winner when it comes to keeping it connected.
The S904 has extra commercial security features and an impressive display. Its mobile connectivity and battery life help to make it a very good value. It’s not as elegant as the Asus Zenbook UX302 or the 13-inch Apple MacBook Air, but if you’re looking for great performance and a huge range of features, this is an ultraportable ideal for business.
| Processor | Intel Core i5-4200U |
| Processor clock speed | 1.6GHz |
| Memory | 8.00GB |
| Memory slots | 1 |
| Graphics processor | Intel HD Graphics 4400 |
| Total storage capacity | 500GB |
| Visible size Native resolution | 2,560 × 1,440 |
| Operating system | Windows 8.1 Pro |
