Panasonic is well known for their Toughbook line of rugged devices and at CES today have unveiled a couple of new Toughpad tablets including a fanless 7 inch model with a Haswell processor that’s as rugged as anything they have produced before.
Not exactly your average ultra portable Windows tablet, the FZ-M1 is similar in design to its larger Toughpad brethren, just in a smaller form factor but still packs a lot of power. It comes with a 7 inch 1200×800 screen, and manages to pack in a 4th gen Intel Core i5 vPro CPU and is actually a fanless design. It runs Windows 8.1 Pro 64-bit with a downgrade option to Windows 7.
Its built to MIL-STD-810G standard, can survive a 5-foot drop and is IP65 dust and water resistant. The display is also sensitive enough so you can use gloves, supports multi touch and is daylight readable.
For ports, there’s USB 3.0, a micro SDXC card slot and can be configured with a barcode, MSR, SmartCard, Serial and LAN It also features GPS, Wi-Fi, NFC, UHF RFID, Bluetooth 4.0 and optional 4G.
For working those long days, battery life is 8 hours and even though its a sealed device the battery is user replaceable. Despite all the power and features packed into the device it weighs only 1.2 pounds and is 0.7 inches thin.
The FZ-M1 will cost $2,099 and should be available this Spring.
it is expensive but why with out an 8″ that is the minimum for comfort and readability ?
Sure, when they make an 8″ one, you will dismiss it and say why don’t they make an 8.1″ (or 8.5 whatever).
Of course it is expensive. I already predicted that before. You wanted to believe otherwise and claimed the $99. Venue Pro 8 deal was not a good deal still.
I can’t believe one inch makes that much of a difference. There is no such thing as “minimum” otherwise smartphones would not have sold in tens of millions.
Avid readers (which I doubt you have been) here are familiar with MIDs that run Windows, but with a 5″ (or so) screen size, and there was a very big following, at least on this very site. And Win XP was not even optimized for small screens.
You are nitpicking and you are making excuses only finding faults with all the recent Windows tablets. Yes, I am sure you think your Tab 3 8.0 is better than everything mentioned here!
you are fighting with ghosts
fanless?! Core i5 in 7 inch, It’s realy realy amazing! I wondering what’s the TDP, and how can they do this?
Wow. How did they do this? Replaceable battery, extended battery, 8 GB RAM, 802.11ac, full size USB 3.0, Core i5, fanless and 8/16 hours of battery life. It’s missing an active digitizer but does have a capacitive stylus and silo.
at a second thought with 8″ version is very tempting
Amazing. I’d like to see a teardown of this. If it doesn’t have heat issues then this is an amazing engineering feat.
If only they made a non-ruggedized consumer version of this. It may shave off some bezel size, thickness and some hundreds of dollars. Although, I do think the price of this thing is justified. Too bad it’s out of my budget though.
Why are there links to the Inbrics M1 database page?
I’d like to see a teardown of this. If this doesn’t have heat issues then Panasonic has some great engineers or enough money can allow you to do a lot of things.
You said what Tom has already said above.
Panasonic has been making Toughbook series since the early 90’s. They are expensive and they sell mainly to commercial and industrial customers who have this requirement of ruggedness, and Panasonic has made a name in this category, finding a nice niche / filling a gap between regular off the shelf products for consumer and commercial use, and then the super rugged, but out-dated and super expensive ones designed for the military.
Great engineers? I don’t know, but why would Panasonic not able to retain some good employees? Nobody wants to work for Panasonic? Enough money? They are still a very large manufacturer despite the economic slow down in Japan so I think they can handle their R&D and manufacturing.
I sense a mistrust here like you don’t believe it can’t not have heat issues. I guess you can wait till it comes out, and then read user reports of it after. Because this particular one I can’t answer you, but it would be very bad for Panasonic if they can’t deliver this one as their target customers are usually big customers.
Sometimes companies can make a bad product among many good ones.
Exactly why I said wait till the user reports come out before any of us talking about this in vapour.
Someone needs to come out with a non-rugged consumer vesion of this! Hopefully that’ll make it cheaper.
This is a very tempting device even at that price. I wonder if it comes in non-white colors.
Is this going to be released in the US and be purchasable by non-businesses?
Do they plan on selling this in single quantitieis?
The source link says there’s a Celeron version. I wonder if it’s Haswell or Bay Trail based and what its cost is.
This is great! i hope the tablet industry will go in that direction and make tough waterproof outside-readable tablets.
But for now, this is just way too expensive.
It’d be nice for an OEM to make a consumer version of this. Not super rugged but still good build quality.
Hoping to see the line between Atom and Core i to be blurred in terms of devices in the future.
Where can I buy this in the US?
I have the same question. Thanks!