Panasonic Launches World's First Heavy-Duty Rugged Tablet
6/16/2011 by: Theo Valich
Japanese electronics giant is well known for its Toughbook series of rugged notebooks. These notebooks were designed for use in challenging environments which demand exactly the opposite of contemporary trends (as thinner and lighter as possible).
Panasonic Toughbook Tablet - Ruged casing, Android Honeycomb, No-nonsense UI, Enterprise-grade security available
Panasonic spot a nice niche on the market and decided to go for it - today, the company unveiled world's first rugged Android tablet (PDF). Under the name Panasonic Toughbook Tablet, Panasonic will launch a tablet featuring a 10.1" "daylight-viewable" LCD screen with resolution of 1024x768 pixels. We have no information on if Panasonic is using PixelQi display or not, but unlike numerous tablets on the market, Toughbook Tablet comes with a matte screen, rather than typical glossy coating. Then again, "daylight-viewable" and "glossy" don't go hand in hand. What is impressive is that the tablet ships with an active stylus (on the image above, look at the lower part of the backplate) and features optimal 3G/4G connectivity. Knowing that Japan is deploying an LTE network, this just might beat Motorola's Xoom for real 4G connectivity (no, HSPA is not 4G).
Battery life? According to Panasonic, not less than 8 hours - "full-shift battery life".
The list of features excluded any mention of processing hardware, meaning you could be looking at a quad-core powered tablet with undisclosed hardware platform. Then again, we rather expect to see Panasonic taking a conservative approach and going for available hardware platforms - but they want to avoid "war of words" between SOC players (NVIDIA, Qualcomm, Samsung, STMicro, TI etc.).
Toughbook Tablet will arrive on market during second half of the year.
Tags:
Panasonic, Toughbook, Toughbook tablet, Android, 10.1", XGA, 1024x768, 3G, 4G, UMTS, HSPA, HDSPA, LTE, daylight-viewable LCD, PixelQi, multi-touch, stylus, active stylus, multi-touch display, GPS, A-GPS, government, B2G, B2B, B2M, target, target market
© 2009 - 2011 Bright Side Of News*, All rights reserved.