Consumer electronics giant Panasonic has launched its new Toughbook and Toughpad range of notebooks and hand-held tablets. The flagship Toughbook 54 is purpose-built for heavy usage and rough handling, as are other products in this line.
The 14-inch Toughbook can withstand being dropped from a height of up to 3 feet. It can also tolerate liquid spills, extreme temperatures and high levels of humidity. What makes this a unique product is that it is only 4.2 pounds, making it much lighter (nearly 2 pounds) than comparable products in the market.
Panasonic calls it the “lightest and thinnest semi-rugged” notebook in the world, and the device is all of 1.2 inches thick – nearly half an inch thinner than its rivals.
But “Tough” in this case seems to apply only to physical use. This is not a hardcore gaming laptop. It sports a Core i5-5300U vPro processor and Intel integrated graphics, and you can get up to 16GB of DDR3 RAM with two storage slots – one for a 256GB SSD and one for a 1TB mechanical disk.
Connectivity-wise, Toughbook 54 offers USB 3.0, HDMI, multiple Ethernet ports, SD card and 4G LTE. It also comes with a fingerprint reader, a Kensington cable lock slot and TPM security chip. Screen resolution isn’t all that fancy, at 1366X768, but there are variants that go up to 1920X1080 pixels.
The unfortunate part is that it does not come with Windows 10 out of the box. You’ll have to pick between Windows 7 Pro or 8.1 Pro. Current starting price is between $1350 and $1400 depending on where you buy it.
Panasonic also has a Toughpad handheld tablet that comes with the same resilient build as the Toughbook. The 5-inch Windows 8.1 tablet offers “military-grade toughness and enterprise-class mobile computing power,” according to Panasonic.
Thanks for reading our work! Please bookmark 1redDrop.com to keep tabs on the hottest, most happening tech and business news from around the world. On Apple News, please favorite the 1redDrop channel to get us in your news feed.
