Panasonic is famous for its Toughbook line of laptops and its Toughpad line of tablets, but they usually tackle bigger diagonals. Well, at CES 2014 they unveiled a smaller unit, with a 7 inch diagonal.
The new slate is dubbed Panasonic Toughpad FZ-M1 and it complies with military standards for dust and water resilience. This model supports a 1280 x 800 pixel resolution, it can withstand a 5 foot drop and has a sensitive display, that can be used with gloves and has good daylight readability. On the connectivity side we’ve got USB 3.0, microSDXC, MSR, SmartCard, Serial, LAN, GPS, WiFi, NFC, UHF RFID, Bluetooth 4.0 and optional 4G.
This model is supposed to offer 8 hours of battery life and even though the battery is sealed, it can be replaced by the user. The product weighs 1.2 pounds and it’s 0.7 inches thin, which for a rugged slate is reasonable. The price is not, since it’s $2,099 and the slate comes to stores this Spring.
