Panasonic Toughbook CF-51

The CF-51 is the latest addition to Panasonic’s Toughbook range; a set of notebooks designed to cope with use in hostile environments. Despite its rather industrial appearance, the CF-51 is a semi-ruggedised model, which is more vulnerable than the fully-ruggedised alternatives in the Toughbook range.

According to Panasonic, the CF-51 has a full magnesium-alloy casing that is resistant to shocks and vibrations. This makes it lighter than notebooks that use ABS plastic of an equivalent strength (3kg), but this notebook didn’t feel as sturdy as the Rock Hardbook reviewed in October.

Panasonic claims the CF-51 can withstand drops from 30cm, but was unwilling to let us recreate the test in our own Labs, so we can’t verify the effectiveness of the foam casing that protects the 60GB hard drive.

There’s not much else to corroborate the CF-51’s claims to ruggedness. Its single Firewire and twin USB2 ports aren’t shielded and could become damaged by sand or dust; and its keyboard isn’t splash resistant.

We were impressed with the screen. Its non-reflective panel works well in most lighting conditions, and has a high native resolution of 1,600 x 1,200, allowing you to view many applications simultaneously.

The CF-51 uses a 2GHz Pentium M processor and 512MB of DDR400 memory, giving it adequate performance as indicated by its Sysmark 2004 score of 151. This performance wasn’t a great drain on its battery life; it lasted a fairly average 161 minutes when running ordinary desktop applications.

Despite its positive elements, we find it hard to recommend the Toughbook CF-51, as there are less expensive, more resilient alternatives.