Every month one product stops everyone in the office in their tracks and this month it’s Fujitsu’s Lifebook. The chassis is genuinely tiny yet feels incredibly solid and well built – the metallic plastic casing barely flexes at all when you pick it up or flex the screen.

And what a screen! While only 10.6 in size the 1280 x 768 widescreen resolution is incredibly bright and sharp. The horizontal viewing angles approach 180 degrees though the vertical performance is more mediocre. Watching HD video was a joy and only enhanced by the glossy coating which impressively cuts out reflections. However, there was a little lag in fast moving places – though it’s not distracting. The stereo speakers aren’t bad for an ultraportable but the volume isn’t massive and there’s virtually no bass.

The desktop appears remarkably crisp but at this size it’s not for those with limited eyesight. In fact, the word ‘small’ sums up much of the P7120. The keyboard, while crisp and with nice action does sport small keys. The mouse is small as are its accompanying buttons too. While we quickly got used to it, others will struggle with the close arrangement – full size keyboards on ultraportables from Dell, Lenovo and Toshiba are certainly more comfortable for lengthy typing.

But the P7120 still has an ace up its sleave with its internal DVD-writer which also supports DVD-RAM. Only Sony has managed this feat in a tiny notebook before. Next to this is a media card slot which supports MS, SD/MMC and xD cards and a USB port. The battery takes up the back but on the left are D-Sub, S-Video, modem, Ethernet, PC Card, mini FireWire and two more USB ports. The front sports two audio jacks while surrounding the keyboard is a fingerprint reader, WLAN switch (for 802.11a/b/g connections) and a power saving ‘Eco’ button.

The latter automatically drops brightness and shuts down power to the hard disk, PC card and optical drive depending on how you’ve set it up. With it all turned on the battery lasted a massive eight hours. In our intensive test with no power saving it ran our multiple applications test for a very impressive five hours.

Indeed, the low power usage runs right through the spec of the machine. The processor is a 1.2GHz Pentium M (note, it’s no low-voltage variant) which limits performance somewhat. Coupled with 512MB of RAM (8MB of which is reserved for graphics) it proved to be 54 percent as fast as our dual core desktop – not ideal for hard core encoders but plenty fast enough for most office and multimedia applications. However, the Intel 915GM graphics chip won’t play games.

At $2649 it represents good value too and, as ever, we’re impressed with Fujitsu’s environmentally friendly fabrication. The warranty of three years RTB with only labour included in the last two years is not quite the onsite luxury we've seen elsewhere. The undersized keys and power stop it from knocking Dell off the A-List, but this is a mighty good smaller alternative.