Review: Panasonic Toughpad FZ-G1 WinPro 8 tablet In the UK, Panasonic is not known as a high-street PC player - but the company’s Tough range of products makes quite an impression in the world of business. Out in the field you’ll spot them in the hands of BT engineers and the like where the manufacturer's rugged laptops, and now tablets, survive the rigours of white-van man …
Try the K-Wagen test with your iPad, then tell me the Panasonic is still fuggly.
We used to use Husky portables, which makes the Panasonic look like a bargain. Still, if your Mercedes K-Wagen gets stuck in a field, you can wedge the tablet under a wheel and use it a leverage to get out of the rut. You then just need to pick up your tablet, go to the nearest stream, dunk it in the water to wash it off, then you can carry on working, where you left off...
The only drawback with the Husky was that, despite being one tough mother, if you accidentally put the battery in the wrong way round (there was no lug to ensure the correct orientation), you would blow out the motherboard!
Devices like the Toughbook and Toughpad aren't there to look nice, they are there to stand the abuse of a field engineer stuffing it in his tool box or letting it slam around in the back of his Transit, then getting caught in a downpour as he tries to fathom out the wiring in a telecoms cabinet on a street corner.
It might be more expensive than an iPad and it might not look as good, but if the enviroment it is being used in requires a tough device, it is a darned sight cheaper than buying a new iPad every couple of weeks...
It is like saying a Land Rover Defender doesn't look pretty, compared to an Audi TT... Drive both of them through a couple of thousand miles of tropical jungle and wash them down and see which one looks pretty... Oh, wait, the TT is sitting under 4' of water 950 miles back. :-D
Also, the testing process to get those certifications isn't exactly cheap. We've just been through the IP6x testing for our terminals and that adds a significant amount to the price, for additional R&D, in house testing equipment, ruined prototypes and actual testing at an acredited body. We got IP69K (it will withstand high pressure, hot water from all side - or a firehose at full power from 1M distance), but we didn't manage to get IP68 (dunk it to 1.5M depth in room temperature water); it let in about an egg-cup full of water after an hour.
(not wanting to get pulled for advertising, no company or product names)
Looks like they've messed up with the screen on this. I have a toughbook with an active digitzer, you can only operate it with the stylus but it's very accurate. It also means it works fine in the rain.
The ability to withstand a 4' drop doesn't sound impressive but it is when you consider what it means. This device will withstand any drop from that height onto a concrete floor. You can do it all day over and over and it won't make any difference. Now with a bit of luck most tablets would survive a 4' fall, possibly on to concrete but if you did it ten times your tablet would be probably be bust. A touchpad will most likely survive much bigger falls, you just can't do it over and over and expect nothing to happen.
This is more for companies that buy their field service kit by the 100s, if not 1000s.
That said it sounds quite good.
I think we are still a long way from the ultimate field service computer device that has the flexibility to capture any market.
I sort of miss the Husky, about the only laptop that had a connector for surface to air missile testing.
The problem is the price. For £2,000 you can give your engineers one Toughbook, or you can buy eight netbooks. Unless they're particularly clumsy, or working in inhospitable environments, they're unlikely to chew through eight netbooks in a four year period.
Most Toughbook users only ever use them inside their vans or site offices; they aren't pressing buttons in heavy rain. For those people, a cheap netbook is a better value proposition than a Toughbook. (Obviously if you do need to press buttons in the rain, then stick with the Toughie.)
If the engineers are operating out of a base daily, then fair enough: balance the cost of "one tough expensive thing" failing, versus the cost "x number of cheap things failing" over a year.
However there are some rarer situations in which you have to calculate the cost of the user not having working kit with them. For example, a remote location that is time consuming and expensive to get to - thus resupply. You're probably paying an engineer a high rate to be there, and if the machine (and its backup) you've supplied him fails and he is unable to do his job without it, you'll have wasted much more than a few thousand dollars.
As Dinosupport above points out, if your working out in the middle of nowhere a broken £200 netbook is not much use. Also, I've never seen a netbook with a proper serial port provided for interfacing with legacy hardware (and no, USB converters don't count).
It's like saying a car repair garage should buy all it's spanners from the pound shop, as they cost about 10 times less than professional grade tools, so what if a job is delayed due to you breaking 2-3 cheap spanners moving that one bolt...
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For a lot less money you could buy a decent tablet [fandroids and fanbois choose as appropriate] and bung it in an armoured case. My iPhone 3GS has withstood about 4 years of being rained on, dropped, covered in oil and muck, etc. with no ill-effects, thanks to being inside an Otterbox Defender case. I've never understood the point of building the "armour" into the gadget itself.
Two specs vital for field work that were needed to be confirmed in your test.
1. The legability of the display under direct sun light ( is 800 cd/m sq quoted in specs enough?)
2. It is capable of working in temps from -20 to 60 c & I assume high values of relative humidity by its IP65 ?
Both these factors would render most laptops, tablets & netbooks as useless for field work even before taking into consideration impact & dust/moisture resistance.
Appologies if I missed this!
Actually the unit has an active (inductive) pen not a capacitive one. From the looks a Wacom unit. So the "rain" problem has a 30second solution - turn of touch. For the environments this unit is designed touch is likely useless anyway between gloves and dirty hands.
And comparing a netbook (or an iThingy/Fragmentdroid toy) to this is like comparing a Trabant to a Mercedes G. This unit has stuff like internal 3G, up to 8GB of memory, full sized SSD, USB-3, WIDI/Miracast capability and a useful screen resolution. Not to mention lots of computing power and a workdays endurance.
Apparently the stylus is an emf field type, and it is not a capacitive pen type. It could be a wacom or n-trig type stylus. http://www.panasonic.com/business/toughpad/us/durable-fz-g1-tablet-photos.asp
A capacitive pen has a rubber nub that compresses when pressed upon like a nipple on milk bottle
https://a248.e.akamai.net/origin-cdn.volusion.com/h4b6e.cu6dg/v/vspfiles/photos/JM-AP-818RE-2.jpg
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