Panasonic's durable, stylish upright
There was a time when notebook computers were fragile flowers – look at them wrong, and they'd break down. When Panasonic adopted the Toughbook name for its notebook line in 1996, it was not just a marketing statement – it was the company's line in the sand, declaring extra ruggedness would be the standard build for all its notebooks. As a result, Panasonic is one of the very few big-name brands you'll consistently see alongside the niche brands that market to the resource sector, police and military and other industries that give their computer gear a very hard time.
When it comes to notebooks, rugged is a relative concept. A notebook that's tossed around with a salesman's sample kit will have a relatively easier life than one that sits in the cockpit of a military tank, and you find this sliding scale described with terms like fully rugged, semi-rugged, durable, etc. There are perils that rugged computers, however defined, will try to address. These are all the factors you’d expect to find in notebook hell: drops and hard knocks, vibration, crush forces, water, dust, chemicals, humidity and temperature extremes, etc.
At a minimum, Toughbooks are designed to give extra protection to two main subsystems: the screen, which is expensive to replace, and the hard drive, which holds the most valuable stuff – your data. The semi-rugged CF-W5 uses a magnesium alloy case, which Panasonic says is 20 times stronger than ABS plastic. The hard drive is mounted in a shock absorbing gel. The CF-W5 has a drop rating of 30 cm (about a foot).
Being an ultraportable means it is also very light (1.2 kg) and compact. It measures 21cm deep by 27 cm wide and the wedge shape is 2.7 cm thick at the leading edge and 4.6 cm at the hinge. Out of the 12.1 inch display, you can get a respectable XGA (1024 x 768) resolution. The expansion and communication options are what you'll typically find on notebooks: VGA out connector, one PC Card slot, an SDHC memory card slot, two USB 2.0 ports, Ethernet and modem jacks, audio in and headphone jacks. The Centrino badge means that it carries Intel's WiFi chip (supports 802.11a, b, g), and a switch on the front edge of the machine allows you to turn the radio on or off. Another switch allows you to turn the optical drive on or off. The DVD burner handles DVD-R, DVD+R, DVD-RW, DVD+RW as well as DVD-RAM. Most notebook drives will use either a pop-out tray or a slot for media, but the CF-W5 has a hinged lid built into the right side of wrist rest that opens to reveal the optical drive spindle.
Even though this is a very small notebook, the keyboard is quite decent. The keys are full width, although more oblong than square, so it takes more precision to avoid inadvertently hitting a key in the row above. The biggest annoyance for me was with the shorter than normal space bar, so I found I often hit the adjoining ALT key. The thin keycaps make the keyboard look somewhat insubstantial – until you start typing on in. It is rock solid, with none of the deck flexing you often encounter on low-end notebooks. In fact, the entire chassis is remarkably rigid. The screen lid, on the other hand, is flexible – I twisted it through a couple of centimetres of deflection and it never felt like anything bad was going to happen. The trackpad is circular and this gives the CF-W5 a unique (and to my mind, quite attractive) appearance.
The notebook uses an ultra-low voltage Intel Core Solo processor, clocking at 1.2 GHz. It’s not the fastest notebook around, and 512 MB of standard RAM will further hamper performance if you have several applications open at once. But to give this some context, what most of us do most of the time – office applications, email, web browsing – barely challenges a gigahertz-plus processor. I found the performance in Photoshop Elements 5 was good even when working with some 12 megapixel images that had a couple of layers. Given that this is not a machine that anyone would consider were they looking for a workstation-class portable, performance is more than enough for most of what we do.
And one of the benefits of the low voltage processor and the switches for the optical drive and WiFi radio is increased battery life. This Panasonic goes on and on. I watched a 2.5 hour DVD movie and when it ended, the power meter still showed 41 percent, which allowed me to work another two hours (mostly light word processing tasks) before the battery low warning message popped up.
The least attractive aspect of this machine is price. It sells for around $2,600 at my local retailer. Compare this with the base model ThinkPad X60, which costs $800 less but gives you the same size screen, a dual core processor, twice the RAM and a bigger hard drive – but no optical drive. If you need a ruggedized, ultralight with exceptional battery life, the Toughbook CF-W5 is a worthy candidate. If you don’t, there are alternatives.
There was a time when notebook computers were fragile flowers – look at them wrong, and they'd break down. When Panasonic adopted the Toughbook name for its notebook line in 1996, it was not just a marketing statement – it was the company's line in the sand, declaring extra ruggedness would be the standard build for all its notebooks. As a result, Panasonic is one of the very few big-name brands you'll consistently see alongside the niche brands that market to the resource sector, police and military and other industries that give their computer gear a very hard time.
When it comes to notebooks, rugged is a relative concept. A notebook that's tossed around with a salesman's sample kit will have a relatively easier life than one that sits in the cockpit of a military tank, and you find this sliding scale described with terms like fully rugged, semi-rugged, durable, etc. There are perils that rugged computers, however defined, will try to address. These are all the factors you’d expect to find in notebook hell: drops and hard knocks, vibration, crush forces, water, dust, chemicals, humidity and temperature extremes, etc.
At a minimum, Toughbooks are designed to give extra protection to two main subsystems: the screen, which is expensive to replace, and the hard drive, which holds the most valuable stuff – your data. The semi-rugged CF-W5 uses a magnesium alloy case, which Panasonic says is 20 times stronger than ABS plastic. The hard drive is mounted in a shock absorbing gel. The CF-W5 has a drop rating of 30 cm (about a foot).
Being an ultraportable means it is also very light (1.2 kg) and compact. It measures 21cm deep by 27 cm wide and the wedge shape is 2.7 cm thick at the leading edge and 4.6 cm at the hinge. Out of the 12.1 inch display, you can get a respectable XGA (1024 x 768) resolution. The expansion and communication options are what you'll typically find on notebooks: VGA out connector, one PC Card slot, an SDHC memory card slot, two USB 2.0 ports, Ethernet and modem jacks, audio in and headphone jacks. The Centrino badge means that it carries Intel's WiFi chip (supports 802.11a, b, g), and a switch on the front edge of the machine allows you to turn the radio on or off. Another switch allows you to turn the optical drive on or off. The DVD burner handles DVD-R, DVD+R, DVD-RW, DVD+RW as well as DVD-RAM. Most notebook drives will use either a pop-out tray or a slot for media, but the CF-W5 has a hinged lid built into the right side of wrist rest that opens to reveal the optical drive spindle.
Even though this is a very small notebook, the keyboard is quite decent. The keys are full width, although more oblong than square, so it takes more precision to avoid inadvertently hitting a key in the row above. The biggest annoyance for me was with the shorter than normal space bar, so I found I often hit the adjoining ALT key. The thin keycaps make the keyboard look somewhat insubstantial – until you start typing on in. It is rock solid, with none of the deck flexing you often encounter on low-end notebooks. In fact, the entire chassis is remarkably rigid. The screen lid, on the other hand, is flexible – I twisted it through a couple of centimetres of deflection and it never felt like anything bad was going to happen. The trackpad is circular and this gives the CF-W5 a unique (and to my mind, quite attractive) appearance.
The notebook uses an ultra-low voltage Intel Core Solo processor, clocking at 1.2 GHz. It’s not the fastest notebook around, and 512 MB of standard RAM will further hamper performance if you have several applications open at once. But to give this some context, what most of us do most of the time – office applications, email, web browsing – barely challenges a gigahertz-plus processor. I found the performance in Photoshop Elements 5 was good even when working with some 12 megapixel images that had a couple of layers. Given that this is not a machine that anyone would consider were they looking for a workstation-class portable, performance is more than enough for most of what we do.
And one of the benefits of the low voltage processor and the switches for the optical drive and WiFi radio is increased battery life. This Panasonic goes on and on. I watched a 2.5 hour DVD movie and when it ended, the power meter still showed 41 percent, which allowed me to work another two hours (mostly light word processing tasks) before the battery low warning message popped up.
The least attractive aspect of this machine is price. It sells for around $2,600 at my local retailer. Compare this with the base model ThinkPad X60, which costs $800 less but gives you the same size screen, a dual core processor, twice the RAM and a bigger hard drive – but no optical drive. If you need a ruggedized, ultralight with exceptional battery life, the Toughbook CF-W5 is a worthy candidate. If you don’t, there are alternatives.
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