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Panasonic Toughbook-Y2An amazingly light and enduring semi-rugged system that needs a better screen. Price: $3,000
Wrapped in a durable magnesium frame, the refreshed Panasonic Toughbook-Y2 is ready for anything that’s thrown its way. Aside from its resilient shell, the Y2 packs nearly six hours of battery life, a fast processor, and a high-resolution 14-inch display into a 3.4-pound chassis.
There’s no denying that the Y2 is on the thick side (1.3 to 1.8 inches, depending on where you’re looking), but the system makes up for its girth with a lighter-than-air, yet solid case that withstands pretty much anything life on the road dishes out. A shock-mounted hard drive will keep your data safe and sound. With only the battery on the back, Panasonic put the rest of the ports on the right side of the system, including two USB ports, a VGA connection, modem and Ethernet ports that are protected by a flip-down rubber cover, a PC Card slot, and an SD Card slot. Up front is where you’ll find the power button and switch that opens the top-mounted DVD/CD-RW drive, which is located directly beneath the keyboard. It pops open like the lid on a DVD player. Unfortunately, the cutout for the optical drive runs right next to the circular touchpad. The touchpad is responsive, but quite small compared to other 14-inch notebooks. We like the full-size keyboard, which makes typing comfortable without feeling too mushy. There are no dedicated volume controls, but you can always use the Fn commands. This version of the Y2 has been upgraded to a 1.5-GHz Pentium M Low-Voltage 758 processor (its predecessor ran at 1.3-GHz), and it comes with a healthy 512MB of RAM to enhance its multitasking performance. For productivity chores, this notebook gets the job done quickly; most applications opened without delay, and we could simultaneously stream Internet radio, check our e-mail, and surf the Web. The Y2’s MobileMark score of 201 put this system in the upper echelon of thin-and-light notebooks. The Y2 blows the competition away when it comes to battery life. With Intel’s 802.11a/b/g Wi-Fi connection turned off, this notebook lasted an impressive 5 hours and 52 minutes. With the radio on, the system lost only 14 minutes of runtime. This kind of endurance means that you’ll be able to get plenty of work done during a cross-country flight, with time left over to watch a full DVD. We did that with Spider-Man 2 and the Y2 easily handled the most frenetic action sequences. Unfortunately, the screen suffers from abnormally narrow viewing angles, especially in the vertical direction. We like that the 14-inch screen sports a very high SXGA resolution of 1400 x 1050 pixels. It’s great for Web surfing with less scrolling and for digital photo editing, but we found ourselves constantly adjusting the display to see Word documents dead-on. The anti-glare coating may be partly to blame. This coating is supposed to make the Y2 a bit easier to use in the car, on the train, or in other situations where there’s a good amount of ambient light. In our experience, the poor viewing angles cancelled out this benefit. If you want to surf the Web on the go, you’ll be pleased with the Y2’s wireless performance. The triband radio averaged a very good 15.9 Mbps of throughput at 50 feet from our access point. Getting connected is a cinch, thanks to the included Intel ProSet Wireless utility, which does a good job of creating and remembering profiles for various locations. Compare Prices | Panasonic Toughbook-Y2 Specifications
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