OK, it’s been a couple of months since my brand-new Fujitsu Q704 tablet with oodles of add-ons and appurtenances showed up at my door. I’m learning to live with the $165 monthly payment that my “let’s experiment with a business lease” ends up costing me. But I’m not as enamored of the machine as I’d hoped to be, and it hasn’t yet graduated to the status of “production traveling machine.” In fact, I’ve been using my older Lenovo i7 X220 Tablet and T420 notebooks more or less interchangeably on the road for the last two years, and am still happy to work with them.

As this image from the Fujitsu site shows, the Q704 is available with a battery-powered keyboard dock (center) and a plain dock with video and three USB 3.0 ports.

But now that I’ve been working with and using the Q704 unit for a while, here are my gripes:

1. The battery-powered keyboard dock is heavy, and turns the unit into a 4.75 lb notebook (it’s not even really an ultrabook, at that weight). Battery life is under 8 hours, too. By contrast my older Dell XPS-12 weighs 3.375 lbs, and gets 5 hours from a single battery.
2. When detaching the tablet from the keyboard dock, I’ve learned that it’s best to shut down. Mode switching from tablet to notebook by docking the unit, and from notebook to tablet by undocking same, is not as easy or trouble-free as I would like it to be.
3. As you might expect, an i7 (even a Haswell U4600) gets pretty warm, if not hot, when busy in the tablet, which can make it a little uncomfortable to hold in the hand or on the lap.
4. The touchpad on the keyboard dock, while sizable, is nowhere as nice to use as the one on the XPS-12, and the bottom buttons only click when pushed toward the center of the touchpad, not on the outside edges (as my fingers seem to want to do, to avoid pushing the right button when seeking the left, and vice-versa). For the kind of money Fujitsu charges for its gear, I’d expect them to use absolute top-of-the-line components, including the touchpad.
5. Given the presence of a U4600, the performance is less than you’d expect, and lower than even some higher-end i5 machines. See the Geekbench results at Tablet PC Review for more details. Read the whole thread to get the overall “nerd-view” of the Q704: it’s not pretty. Apparently, waterproofing perforce means less efficient ventilation and lower performance because of thermal inefficiencies. Sigh.

All in all, I’m hopeful that a combination of BIOS fixes and “best use practices” will help me extract a more acceptable experience from my Q704. Should be interesting to see how it all turns out.