Fujitsu Lifebook: a worthy successor to my iPad Pro?
I have a love-hate relationship with my Fujitsu Lifebook. Sometimes I think it’s awesome and way better than my iPad Pro. Sometimes I want to close the lid and never open it again.
It’s lighter than my iPad Pro, has a full sized keyboard that works, and the full power of Windows Apps (not the compromised ones on iPadOS). OneDrive is faster than on either the iPad or MacOS. I don’t need to carry dongles around with me, and the battery lasts the 5 hours or so I generally need when fully unplugged.
Then I try and draw on it and forget it can’t tell what’s a stylus and what’s the edge of my hand. Windows 11 hasn’t decided if it wants to be English or Japanese. The quality of the screen isn’t as bright and crisp as the iPad Pro. Sometimes I have to reboot it to get it to recognise the SD Card slot.
My go-to apps (Affinity Designer and Affinity Photo) aren’t quite as slick in full-fat Windows mode as they are on iPadOS. Serif (who make the Affinity suite) could do with revamping the UI to make touch-screen Windows devices as intuitive as their Apple cousins.
Probably someone has performance stats to show my perception the Lifebook is quicker than the iPad is wrong. Yet I can flick between apps far easier on Windows than iPadOS, and Affinity actually supports copy/paste between its apps. I even prefer the web based version of Apple Pages to the one on iPadOS.
My iPad is starting to show its age. It’s still a damned good graphics tablet, but keyboard number 2 is failing the same way as the first. The pencil won’t charge in the USB slot. Sometimes iPadOS decides I meant to do something completely different to what I wanted. Don’t get me started on split screen.
Whether I’ll replace it with another iPad, or just move over to this Lifebook remains to be seen. As things stand, if my iPad died tomorrow I’ll probably not be in a rush to replace it.
Since I wrote this blog post I decided to ditch Windows completely and move back to Apple products. You can read why in this update.
My name is Ross Hori
I'm a freelance writer, designer and photographer. By day I create articles, features and reports. At night I take photos and write fiction. Find out more.
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