This rather small Centrino-powered notebook from Fujitsu has been designed for students and the hip-crowd; those that want something that's capable of work and entertainment, is not too large or heavy to carry, and that can easily balance on a café table between text books and a hot latte.

The P5020 is stylish and petite, yet under the facade there's some quite nice specifications and it's a marvel that Fujitsu could fit it all into the small body. Featuring a 1Ghz Pentium-M processor and 512MB of DDR SDRAM, the Lifebook P5020 also comes with a 60GB HD and somehow manages to also squeeze a DVD combo drive into its tiny frame.

Its 10.6in screen comes with a shiny protective coating which lends the Lifebook a distinct entertainment air -- it's more like looking at a TV screen than an LCD panel. It has a widescreen aspect ratio, and a native resolution of 1,280 x 768. It's nice to work on, but the widescreen screams out for DVD playback, and the unit doesn't disappoint. While there is the tiniest of lag with some heavy scenes, it's hardly noticeable. While the in-built speakers are tinny there's both analog 3.5mm audio and SPDIF output ports.
The P5020 is no speed demon as it uses the Intel 855GM chipset onboard graphics and has a 1GHz CPU, but it returned an average PCmark04 score and is able to handle general day-to-day usage. One problem we noticed though is the smaller than usual keyboard sometimes required quite strong key-presses to get the keystrokes to register.

While the Fujitsu Lifebook brand is being marketed as a premium notebook brand, and while the Lifebook P5020 has excellent build quality and top-notch componentry in an excellent design, we can't help but feel that it's still a little expensive. That said, it's an appealing notebook that's sure to find its fans.