Panasonic's new ToughBooks were launched amongst the rugged outback of central Australia, where dangers abound.
Panasonic is the market leader in the fully rugged notebook space, with customers including, Telstra, Sydney Water, National Foods, Coca-Cola Amatil, Bluescope steel, Mitsubishi Motors, and Ambulance Victoria.
However, several competitors exist in the rugged notebook space including NEC, and Avantec.
(Credit: ZDNet.com.au)
I'd rather buy 9 Netbooks for under $400 and throw them around instead of risking everything on one machine...The major players need to wake up and realize consumers are in a financial rut and are looking for better values (meaning bigger bangs for the buck).
Sorry Panasonic...I owned a T4 in the old days but and served me well, but money is scarce and hard to find these days.
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The A$3,600 price tag is explained as justified by being rugged. Of course the One Laptop Per Child project's laptop is the comparison that needs to be made. The OLPC is selling (very large quantity orders only) for US$200, and it is able to take water and dust over its screen and keyboard etc.. and uses a SSD in place of HDD. The only real holes for dust or moisture on the OLPC are the USB ports on the side. Of course the OLPC does not have up-market specs, but rather just sufficient grunt to do all needed apps under Ubuntu. But if you are a utility's staff doing remote meter reading, remote job logging etc, either laptop could do those jobs!