Laptop Review: Panasonic Toughbook F9

Why aren't all notebooks built like this? The Panasonic Toughbook F9 is, the company claims, the lightest laptop in the 14.1-inch class -- 3.6 pounds, not much more than a netbook. Its magnesium alloy case feels so light you'll think it feels hollow, as if there's something missing, perhaps the battery, but no -- everything's present and accounted for, including the optical drive that many lightweights lack (a DVD±RW burner tucked under the keyboard). And everything's admirable, from the screen and keyboard to a cool circular touchpad that lets you twirl a finger to scroll through documents.

Why aren't all notebooks built like this? The Toughbook family is built to shrug off the bumps and thumps of travel. Even the F9, which is classified merely as "business rugged" -- the mildest of Panasonic's mobile masochist categories, below the military-grade semi- and fully rugged models -- can survive abuse that would shatter ordinary laptops, from repeated drops to being accidentally sat on. Its keyboard is designed to resist liquid spills of up to seven ounces.

Why all notebooks aren't built like this: The Toughbook F9 costs $2,899. That's five times the price of a generic consumer 14.1-inch laptop, or more than twice the price of a comparably corporate Core i5 system like Dell's Latitude E6410. How can Panasonic get away with it?

Well, simply seeing and feeling the featherweight, top-quality computer is half the story. (And we haven't even mentioned the niftiest feature yet -- the F9's built-in, foldaway carrying handle.) The other half is total cost of ownership, where Panasonic quotes analyst firm VDC that after-purchase downtime and servicing account for 70 percent of typical portable PCs' costs. Ruggedized notebooks cut down downtime; Panasonic claims the Toughbook product line has an average failure rate of 2.2 percent versus business laptops' average 22 percent.

No question, the F9 is a premium product -- a status symbol for road warriors. But if you've bid goodbye to more than one notebook in your career from jolts, jostles, and catastrophes in transit, you'll be tempted.

No Frills

The Panasonic's screen offers 1,440 by 900 resolution. It's bright and colorful, albeit at only its top couple of brightness settings and from a fairly direct head-on view -- things dim, with white backgrounds turning gray, at viewing angles of more than 20 degrees or so. Text and icons are very sharp and easy to read.

Recessed behind a deep palm rest -- four and a half to five inches, counting that carrying handle -- the keyboard offers a plasticky yet responsive typing feel and a comfortable layout, with dedicated Home, End, PgUp, and PgDn keys as well as cursor arrows. (Two gripes: The Delete key is on the bottom row next to the left arrow, instead of in the top right corner, and the spacebar is rather short -- just four keys wide.)

The aforementioned touchpad is a 1.75-inch-diameter circle, with arc-shaped left and right mouse buttons below it. It works smoothly. The bonus trick -- swirling your finger around its circumference to scroll vertically (clockwise = down; counterclockwise = up) -- soon feels natural.

On the notebook's left side are PC Card and SD card slots, headphone and microphone jacks, and a connector for a proprietary docking station. At the right are three USB 2.0 ports, a VGA port, and modem and Ethernet connectors. You won't find any fancy newfangled ports like HDMI, DisplayPort, eSATA, or USB 3.0, though Qualcomm's Gobi2000 wireless broadband is an option and both 802.11a/b/g/n Wi-Fi and Bluetooth wireless are standard.

The DVD±RW drive is built into the palm rest, with its rear resting under the right half of the keyboard. A sliding switch on the system's front edge turns on power to the optical drive, normally deactivated for battery conservation's sake, and performs the eject (open lid) function.

Benchmarks, Battery Life, Toughness Under Torture

Battery life is neither disappointing nor exhilarating: The Panasonic lasted three hours and 15 minutes when playing DVD movies, while our real-world test sessions -- which combine word processing and Web surfing with slideshow and video viewing and some file copying and scrubbing to exercise the hard drive -- averaged just under five hours.

Perhaps our most serious slam against the F9 is that system memory is a skimpy 2GB, with 32-bit Windows 7 Professional preinstalled; in this price range, at least 4GB of RAM and the 64-bit operating system to take advantage of it ought to be standard.

By contrast, we have no complaint with the Intel Core i5-520M, a robust 2.4GHz dual-core, four-thread CPU. Along with a 320GB Toshiba hard disk, it powered the Panasonic to PCMark Vantage and Geekbench benchmark scores of 5,543 and 4,123 respectively. The F9 took 2 minutes and 9 seconds to render Cinebench R10's sample scene.

The chip's Intel GMA HD graphics chipped in with a 3DMark06 score of 1,229 and 2.3 fps in the Heaven benchmark (both at 1,440 by 900).

Closed and switched off, the Toughbook can endure one-foot drops onto a hard surface from two dozen different angles; open and running, it's designed to withstand a two and a half-foot fall onto its base (e.g., being knocked off a desk). We didn't duplicate that test, but repeatedly lifted it 18 inches above a table and let it drop, wincing at the crash but marveling as the Panasonic kept running without missing a beat.

Nor was the F9 fazed when we spilled several ounces of water onto its keyboard -- the spill drained out a hole in the bottom. Finally, we used it as a seat cushion -- Panasonic says the computer can stand 220 pounds of pressure, as when being transported or jammed into an overhead bin. The Toughbook survived our bulk without cracking.

No, we didn't get totally medieval on our test unit (six words that spook the HardwareCentral accounting department: "You break it, you bought it"), and the F9 isn't guaranteed to withstand all imaginable abuse. But it's a sure bet to survive drops and dings that would put the average laptop out of commission and average laptop owner out of sorts.

The Toughbook F9 is a remarkably light, likable notebook you won't have to handle with kid gloves. That doesn't eliminate its steep price, but it offsets it.