Panasonic’s Toughbook series has always been characterised by solid, somewhat heavy, ruggedised designs and to some extent, price tags to match. However, the brand-new Toughbook CF-53 is one of the best we’ve seen yet, combining good app speed, tough design, passable weight and exceptional battery life. It starts with Intel’s dual-core Core i5-2520M pushing our Encode HD benchmark to within a whisker of 70, which is a decent effort.
It’s designed to run hard and long without power, with its sizeable 6,300mAh battery delivering 3 minutes short of 6 hours in our demanding UserBench Battery test, and it weighs just a little over 2.6kg.
There’s a decent list of peripheral ports including an SDXC card reader, USB 3.0, VGA, HDMI and even a nine-pin DB9 serial port for specialised peripherals. The 320GB hard drive is a bit small, though. Inside this chassis, the drive will handle a fall from 76cm without damage, which is excellent for a platter-based drive. You can even pour a glass of liquid onto the keyboard without damage.
While it’s designed with demanding outdoor applications in mind, including telecommunications and engineering, you can’t help but think it would be great for schools, given its tough design. Arguably as impressive as anything else, though, is the $2,199 price tag.
