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Panasonic Toughbook 27Rugged and beautiful, with outdoor productivity in mind (June 1999 issue) Continuing the CF-25 line of Toughbooks, Panasonic has come out with the CF-27, with more computing power and significantly improved daylight screen performance. I began this review out in the daylight, sitting on the grass near our offices, typing into the Toughbook. Behind me was a big blue mailbox where people come all the time from the surrounding offices to leave their mail. The first guy to come by noted how unusual it was to even be able to see the screen outside at all, let alone in direct sunlight. He had to come all the way over to see if what he was seeing was real, it was that good. I think I may have made a sale for the Toughbook right there, just by typing on the grass.
The touchpad doesn't work really well. It's okay with broad sweeping motions, but one can sometimes get hung up trying to do finer things like selecting an item in the Start menu: it just doesn't notice small movements. When you consider that it is designed to work in a downpour with gloves on, however, I think it can be forgiven. For most menu stuff, the touch screen is superior to the touchpad, so it's good to have both. Again, designed for use with gloves, the keyboard is fantastic. It is a little bouncy, due to the heavy rubber membrane that protects the unit from rain, but it is not annoying once you get used to it. Anyone with normal to large-size hands will appreciate the large keycaps. They even made an effort to move the four arrow keys down out of the way a bit so you can have a full right shift key. Many notebooks shorten this key to the annoyance of most of us in an effort to shoehorn the arrow cursor keys in. In my mind, it's always been the wrong thing to do, and Panasonic obviously feels the same way. This Toughbook feels as rugged as it looks, with its heavy duty magnesium case, solid access doors, and manly die cast aluminum handle (it's removable, but it is so convenient, I can't imagine why you'd want to). The magnesium alloy is 20 times the tensile strength of the normal ABS plastic used in most notebook computers. The Toughbook has the look of a fine gun case, and when you close the latch it snaps shut with an unusually gratifying, solid metal click. It is finished in a flat black that means business, though its coarse texture tends to grab at fibers and skin when handled or cleaned, a common problem with ruggedized matte paint. Scuff marks will have to be tolerated. The monitor housing is as firm as all notebook housings should be, but usually are not. This one won't twist at all. Having lost LCD panels to twisting and impact, even when in a case, this feature alone makes me want a Toughbook. Access doors are necessary on most notebooks to keep dust out, but the Toughbook has doors that are better compared to hatches on a ship. While they don't quite screw shut, the latches are impressive, and the gasket materials are designed to keep water out. There is a door on the left for swapping the CD ROM with the Floppy drive, on the right for inserting PC Cards, and a large one in the back for accessing the various ports, including keyboard, USB, headphones, microphone, docking station, SVGA, parallel and serial. When this door is closed, there is a smaller sliding door that reveals the docking port. It is a well-thought-out design. The unit ships with Windows 95. I guess they are just more used to and have worked around most of the bugs of 95, and aren't ready to commit to 98. One of the first things I found built into the OS is handy reference to Panasonic support, accessible by right clicking on the My Computer icon and selecting properties. There's a button right in the General window that brings up support numbers for 14 countries, oddly excluding Japan. I suppose the Japanese version of the OS has that number. Inside, the Toughbook is also tough. Most of these computers spend their time riding around in police cars, mounted to the chassis via a bracket of some sort. All road vibration and jerking that is felt in the chassis is transmitted to the computer. To deal with this, the 4GB hard drive in the Toughbook is encased in a shock-absorbing-gel-filled stainless steel chamber, which is removable for easy swapping. Everything is tied together with a proven Intel Pentium 266 MHz MMX processor, 512K L2 Pipeline Burst Cache, and 32 MB of EDO RAM. A new emphasis for the toughbook is wireless connectivity. An add-on option that can be bundled on purchase, the compact Panasonic-developed H.O.T. (High-gain, Omni-directional, Telescopic) antenna offers access to American Mobile DataTAC, BellSouth Wireless Data, and CDPD. The antenna is mounted in the top left of the monitor housing, and slides back in when not in use. This option will be especially interesting to agencies wishing to outfit their mobile forces with continuous wireless data on demand without having to have a PC Card antenna sticking out the side. These things are tough, and Panasonic makes no secret that they are number one in the law enforcement market. There are some interesting stories about these Toughbooks surviving in some pretty hairy situations. In a particular case in Florida, an officer was rear-ended while parked at a traffic stop, and was hurt pretty badly. The Toughbook was in the trunk. The patrol car was totalled, but when they cut the Toughbook free from the mangled car, it was still intact and booted right up. That's pretty tough. Other reports have to do with Toughbooks getting shot, run over, and dropped. I'm sure an officer could get in trouble, but in a pinch, it could easily be used as a defensive weapon, it's that solid. While it is built and designed for industrial, mission-critical, and public safety applications, I know of a lot of frequent travellers who would prefer such a device for their main workhorse computer. Many takeoffs and landings make for some rough use of a notebook, as its shuffled from desktop to car seat to desktop. IT managers with gruff, tough-on-hardware staff should also consider this notebook. Because of its vertical market focus, you're not going to find one in CompUSA, but you should be able to find a reseller through Panasonic's 800 number on page 38. Having spent some time with the Toughbook CF-27, I've become convinced that this is how all notebook computers should be designed. Thin, fragile computers be damned, make mine a Toughbook. -
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The great daylight visibility is achieved with Panasonic's new technology, DayBrite ARX. It employs an anti-glare coating used on the Hubble Space Telescope, as well as on aircraft windshields, to both cut glare and transmit more light from the LCD. There is a bit of a trade off, for indoors the monitor is a little less bright when compared to regular LCDs, but given that this is a computer designed primarily for outdoor use, the trade off is a good one. Surely part of the reason the screen is dimmer is that it also has a digitizer built in; in other words, it has a touchscreen monitor, which actually works very well. I prefer it over the touchpad that is mounted in front of the keyboard. Oddly, there appears to be air between the touchscreen and LDC; no one at Panasonic could tell me why, but the other Toughbook we reviewed had the same thing.