PANASONIC TOUGHBOOK R7 REVIEW

The Panasonic Toughbook R7 is not the regular kind of notebook you can take home at Best Buy. It’s a Japanese model imported all the way in to the US market and it’s pretty exclusive in that it’s even more portable than an ultra-portable at present like the Apple MacBook Air. Is it worth the entire claim? Check that out.

Design
The R7 is designed solely to offer an amazing battery life while still being capable for day-to-day works, unlike the regular handheld PC or any similar ones. It’s being offered in eleven different colors and enormous configurations are made available.

Though Panasonic doesn’t offer any guarantees regarding the R7’s ability to withstand specific intense testing, it does take claim that an R7 in its test lab was strong enough to withstand 110lbs. and even an 11.8” drop. The hard drive is also shock-mounted to help it behave rugged at times of a head-on crash in case the laptop is dropped.

Performance
Despite its tinny, tiny footprint the R7 is actually packs in a decent punch of power for a laptop of this size. It’s loaded with a Centrino, and hence it has an Intel chipset CPU and even wireless connectivity. The processor is an Intel Core 2 Duo processor at clocking speed of 1.2GHz, and it’s the low-voltage mod that sips very little battery juice. It comes with a memory launch of 1GB of RAM, 80211.G wireless and a 160GB hard drive.

As a mega-portable laptop, the R7 does give away some expandability options to the gods of portability. The biggest drawback of them all is that it lacks an optical drive, which is very much a common for laptops of this size. However, it does offer the luxury of two USB ports, VGA-out, Gigabit Ethernet and it even has an expansion slot. Not only can you get more hard disk space, but you can also get an R7 with a bigger capacity hard drive, an even slightly faster CPU and Vista Business instead of the present XP Pro (though we wouldn’t recommend it unless you plan to get upgraded to 2GB of RAM).

The only thing that hindered us when using it for common tasks was the keyboard and the irritating fact that it is really small. A lot of the keys are much smaller than usual, which is to be anticipated, but it makes typing a real difficult task.

Conclusion
The Toughbook R7 is certainly a distinctive laptop in that it combines 2 characteristics portability and ruggedness. We really admire how light and portable it is, and boosted with its 5-plus hours of battery life are just simply great. This is the kind of laptop you could afford to carry with you all day and never need to plug in and stay beside for frequent charging.

Pros
+ Extremely portable
+ Exuberant battery life
+ Amazing 11 color options

Cons
- Expensive to the extremes
- Keyboard is too little to be comfy

Value For Money

Our Rating