Fujitsu-Siemens Amilo Xi 3650

The prices given correspond to the whole Xi 3650 range. Some models listed aren't as high end and have fewer options.

Fujitsu-Siemens, whose products often feature in our surveys, have added this new 18.4 inch to their range. The Amilo Xi3650-001 looks a lot like the smaller Amilo mini and Pa 3553 but is much bigger! Black and white, with straight lines: Super-size me please.

Handling, design and build

The black and white design and straight lines are recognisable throughout the whole line of standard laptops and LCD screens, whether you like it or not. It's all down to taste. Overall, reactions are positive as this product stands out with quite a few different features.


The touchpad really is poor. The clicks arent nice to use and the glassy-feel surface is not ideal for moving your finger on. It also seems to be floating in space. It would have been better to see more surface area given over to it. Poor use of space also applies to the keyboard. 2 cm either side are unused, excepting the on/off button. This is a real shame as there was space to spread it out much more. Happily there is a number pad on the right: very practical for office docs.

This laptop isn't noisy, except when a lot of demands are put on it. This happens when you turn it on, which we found particularly worrying.

The webcam image is good, a Logitech, a quality brand. When it comes to audio, results don't measure up. The voice is a little muffled and you have to speak right into the microphones to make yourself heard.

On the side of the machine you'll find: 1 RJ45, 1 USB/e-SATA, 3 USBs, 4 mini-jacks of which 1 is optical, 1 memory card reader, 1 FireWire, 1 HDMI and 1 VGA. Faultless. On the left, if you push a button, a remote slides out of its slot (see image below and a feature you'll also see on HP's 13 inch dv3525ef series). It slots into the device's casing which keeps you from losing it.

Under the laptop, you can access two Fujitsu hard drives and the RAM.

USB/e-SATA, RJ45	Remote
4 mini-jacks	VGA, HDMI, FireWire, USB

Processor Power
Vista index: 4.6. Details: CPU 5.2 - Memory 5.9 - Graphics 5.9 - Gaming graphics 5.5 - Main hard drive 4.5.

Our laptop performance test procedure is evolving and is now closer to CPU tests. The idea is to retain practical tests with software for video and music encoding, file compression etc. On these tests, the Fujitsu Siemens Amilo Xi3650 finishes ahead of the two other 18.4 inch machines tested today. It finishes two lengths in front of the Sony Vaio VGN-Aw11S (27% better on average) and a head in front of the HP HDX18 (11.7% slower on average).


This model comes with a Blu-Ray player (optional) and can play high quality video. When reading HD files we didn't note any difference between activation and disactivation of graphics acceleration in Power DVD (no doubt a bug). The reading remained around 80 Watts whatever for around 50% CPU usage.

Gaming

The higher a panel's definition, the tougher the task for the graphics card. Compared to a modern 15 inch 1440x900 pixel screen, there are 60% more pixels to manage here. Gonna need to roll up its sleeves.

We wouldn't have bet a copeck on the graphics capacity of these machines, but we'd have been wrong! We managed to play several recent titles including Crysis, World in Conflict and Race Driver Grid at native resolution. You do need to reduce graphics quality to a low setting at times (as with Crysis) and avoid antialiasing. All the same, you can play pretty much anything on these laptops, which is good news.

Audio

The audio side, as often with Fujitsu-Siemens, is really powerful. Even too much so. As soon as you go higher than about a third volume capacity, vibrations and crackling manifest themselves. When the sound is saturated, the vibrations come from parts of the chassis and plastic parts and generate disagreeable noise. And you can be sure that as soon as you get up to around two thirds, it's going to saturate. When it comes to improving the audio, there's no Dolby HT included, just some superficial features from the built in HD-Audio chipsets. These features might amuse you for a couple of minutes before you start to regret the fact that there is no audio correction worthy of the name. On top of this, the headphones out is noisy and easily affected by the mouse.

Battery life and portability

Fully equipped, this model comes in at close to 4Kg. Obviously not just over-size but pretty heavy if you're planning to lug it around. A 2 hour battery life does make portability envisageable but certainly isn't convincing and is a real weak point on these machines.