First, the upside: the combination of a multitouch screen with gesture recognition and a more traditional, stylus-based interface mesh well together. Given my weird combination of cursive and printing, handwriting recognition works surprisingly well using the stylus. The included Microsoft showcases the Windows 7 multitouch interface quite well. Having a sort of portable notepad seems like a useful thing.
On the other hand, the Tablet PC stylus interface seems dated and arcane next to the multitouch, finger-oriented interface. Microsoft really needs to reconcile the two very different UIs. Sure, using a pen is a somewhat different experience than using your fingers, but the user interface doesn't need to be so different. The Lifebook T580 seems light at just 3 pounds, 2 ounces without the power brick, but lugging it around on your arm as a tablet gets pretty tiring after a bit. Compared to a newer tablet, like Apple's , the Fujitsu seems overly bulky. But then, it's also a full PC.
You can swivel the display and tuck it on top of the keyboard to use it exclusively as a tablet device. The pen interface, though finicky, works well with apps like Microsoft OneNote. Swivel it back, and you can use the keyboard. Although the T580 is roughly netbook size, its keyboard is substantially better in feel than those of most netbooks, offering good tactile feedback. The keys are more crowded than on a full-size notebook, however, so touch typists may make more errors than normal. The trackpad isn't overly sensitive, and the buttons are easy to press. Even so, I found myself using either my fingers or the stylus instead of the trackpad.
The display is one of those tiny 10.1-inch affairs, but offers an impressive 1366-by-768-pixel resolution. Text is crisp and the colors seem properly saturated and reasonably accurate. Video looks fairly good viewed from the sweet spot. Audio is another matter. The sound quality is actually pretty good--neutral and balanced--but even at maximum volume in moderately quiet environments, music and video content is hard to hear. When the T580 is set up in full tablet mode, the volume becomes very dim, since the speakers are muffled by the display. The unit cries out for good headphones.
The T580 won't win any awards for raw performance, scoring a fairly low 65 on PC WorldBench 6. Certainly the 1.3GHz, Intel Core i3 380UM ultralow-voltage CPU is a factor. Battery life is reasonably robust at nearly 5 hours. Still, you don't get a tiny system like this to run high-performance applications.