I have acquired a new Fujitsu Lifebook UH75/J ultrabook computer recently, and depending on how I look at it, I can view the said acquisition as either a blessing or a curse. In essence, the UH75/J is an engineering marvel of mixed emotions, and I shall explain why in further detail as we move on.
*Note: I'm not going to go into the technical specs of the UH75/J in this blog post. You can just Google for them yourself. Also, I'm not going to touch on every aspect of the ultrabook here as well, I'm just going to write about the stuff that I think deserves some attention.
Basics
Essentially, the Lifebook UH75/J is the Japanese counterpart of the Lifebook U772. Both are almost the same in terms of internal specifications, although the U772 comes with more powerful configuration options than mine, or maybe I'm just not aware if the same is available for my UH75/J. Both use variants of new Ivy Bridge mobile processors, a required trend for similar products of its generation touting the "Ultrabook" Intel branding.
My UH75/J comes equipped with an Intel Core i5 3317U, with its four cores usually clocked at around 1.70GHz, which is surprisingly adequate despite ARMv7 processors on mobile phones slowly encroaching towards that clock rate. The memory supplied is the de-facto standard for mid-range computers at the time of this writing, which is 4GBs f DDR3. Sadly, the RAM isn't possible to be upgraded due to the nature of ultrabooks to completely lock down their internals, supposedly to make sure that everything will fit in their tightly slender cases.
The ultrabook is capable of WiFi 802.11 wireless connectivity as well as WiMAX connections, but because of the unavailability(?) of WiMAX connections in the Philippines, I'm not so sure if I would ever benefit from the latter. The ultrabook does not possess a native wired ethernet adapter, probably because it wouldn't fit on the sides of the ultrabook, and in its place is a proprietary port where you could plug in the ethernet dongle provided with the laptop.
The UH75/J comes with a webcam on top of the screen, although I don't really find the need to use it. It also comes with a fingerprint scanner, in case you're too lazy to type your passphrase everytime you need to authenticate with your laptop.
It has Windows 8 preinstalled, though I'm not sure if I would ever use it for work. I'd most likely boot into Windows just to play some games.
Construction
The screen size of the UH75/J is 14" in diameter diagonally, with an aspect ratio of 16:9, with stuff rendered in the screen's native resolution of 1366x768. It is also weighs only a bit more than a pound, and it's just as thin as all the other laptops out there with the "Ultrabook" branding. The bulk of the UH75/J is squeezed into a magnesium alloy shell which presumably keeps the body rigid while maintaining its light weight. That's great, because it would suck if my ultrabook's body suddenly depressed under the weight of my hands, or swayed around like a real book if I was carrying it around with my hand.
One thing that's disappointing about the design was that the notebook's only fan was positioned directly above the spot where one's legs would most likely be holding the laptop up, which degrades the fan's performance while the ultrabook is placed upon one's lap. But that's probably just the sad truth about laptops in general: they don't really perform well on people's laps.
Another major disappointment, and I must say is the worst part of the UH75/J, is its keyboard. No, it's not because the keyboard is in the Japanese layout (you can easily switch keyboard layouts in Windows and Linux), it's just that the keyboard feels so awkward to type on due to the fact that there is very little room for the keys to depress onto once pressed, leaving very little feedback for your fingers to feel whenever you hit a key, unless you type with more than enough force on the keys like I do. I did get familiar with the keyboard after a few days of usage, but it still feels awkward for me sometimes. It's probably just because I'm used to the amazing keyboard that my Thinkpad X60s has.
It comes with a clickpad (a touchpad that does not have any external buttons but rather relies on "zones" around the clickpad that can be programmed as left, right and middle buttons) that isn't too great or isn't too bad, though it is quite troublesome to configure in Linux.
Windows 8
The UH75/J is a Japanese laptop, so obviously Windows 8 came in almost completely translated into Japanese. I'm not really that good in understanding Japanese, though I can read Kana, nevertheless, it didn't take me much effort to install the English language packs into Windows 8 and enable them. However, the system utilities (which I think are just bloatware) pre-installed by Fujitsu are hard-coded into Japanese, but I don't think I'd be using them anyway anytime soon.
Microsoft Office 2010 comes pre-installed by default, although like Windows, everything is rendered in Japanese. A little tweaking will make Office translate the tooltips into English when you hover over something, however, so I don't really mind.
Gaming Capability
I don't think the UH75/J was ever built with gaming in mind, because of its integrated Intel HD 4000 graphics card. However, the GPU appears to be capable of handling most games that doesn't reach the graphics requirements of games like Far Cry 3 and Crysis 3. I've tested games such as Dota 2 and Team Fortress 2 and the UH75/J appears to handle them quite well on medium level settings. I've also tested Payday: The Heist on the UH75/J and I'm getting an FPS range on about 21-35 depending on what's going on, on the lowest settings.
Installing Linux
As with every machine and box that I own which isn't primarily used for gaming, I installed Linux on the UH75/J, with Kubuntu (the KDE variant of Ubuntu) as my distro of choice. Additional steps had to be made to make Linux boot on the laptop, however. First, I had to delete the other NTFS partition Fujitsu had allocated for the laptop that it doesn't even use (this could presumably used for user media), then shrank the partition Windows 8 is installed on until it was just about 100GB (should be enough for Windows and a few games, I don't really work on Windows). Then I turned off Secure Boot in th UH75/J's BIOS settings. The BIOS is also conveniently written in Japanese, however, it's trivial to set the language to English. Once Secure Boot is disabled, I was now able to boot into Kubuntu through a USB drive. I created three new partitions in place of the empty, unallocated space: a 30GB ext4 partition for the root install, 8GB for swap, and the rest for my home directories, so that I can easily distro-hop without any problems.
Surprisingly, Kubuntu worked with the laptop without needing extensive configurations to make stuff work. The Intel GPU's was predictably resolved immediately by Ubuntu thanks to Intel's efforts to keep the Linux GPU drivers open-source and regularly maintained. Sound is working perfectly, with both playback and recording crystal clear. The proprietary ethernet dongle that came with the UH75/J also worked without a hitch. Wireless is working very well as well, although I wasn't able to test the WiMAX capabilities of the ultrabook under Linux.
The only major problem that I have with the UH75/J in Linux is probably the
Getting the fingerprint scanner to work in Linux requires some work, but it's not too hard. All you need is to install fingerprint-gui and then follow the instructions to get it working. Most desktop environments should be able to take advantage of fingerprint-gui in their logons.
I'm thinking of migrating into another distro once I'm tired of Kubuntu, but not because things aren't working very well with Ubuntu, of course. I won't be migrating to something hardcore like Arch Linux or Gentoo yet, until I can finalize that everything can work properly under mostly automated configurations.
Battery life
The UH75/J has good enough battery life on its own, although because the battery is non-replaceable, extensive care of the battery should be considered. I usually just keep it plugged in at home, and then run it off the batteries every once in a while. Hopefully its capacity will retain after a year of usage.
Verdict
The UH75/J is a laptop for people who are looking for a good performing Japanese ultrabook, although people who aren't are better off looking at its international variant, the U772, or just look at other ultrabooks altogether, since most of them outperform the UH75/J in many aspects, most importantly the keyboard. The UH75/J can also be somewhat pricey, though that's the same story for every ultrabook anyway.
