Panasonic Toughbook W4

Panasonic’s Toughbook W4 is an ultraportable that stands up to real-world abuse on the road. At 2.8 pounds, this laptop is so light that you’ll forget it’s in your carrying case, and you can work unplugged for nearly 6.5 hours. A unique top-loading optical drive only adds to this tiny wonder’s appeal.

The deep texture of the lid not only creates a cool, unique look, but it also adds strength, protecting the display from any force applied to the top of the Toughbook W4. Other ruggedized features include a removable, shock-mounted 40GB hard drive, a locking optical drive latch, sealed modem and Ethernet jacks, and a strong, yet lightweight magnesium-alloy shell.

Aesthetically, we like the placement of the lid’s hinge at the front bottom of the screen, which causes the display to recede slightly behind the base as you open it. This creates a lower profile ideal for a coach class seat tray. The subtly ridged texture of the palm rest is a nice touch, but the circular touchpad takes some getting used to.

The installed DVD-ROM/CD-RW drive isn’t accessed from the side or the front of the notebook. Instead, the panel on the right side of the palm rest pops up. As a result, it’s impossible to accidentally open the drive when the lid is closed. However, we would have preferred to see a DVD burner installed in a notebook priced over $2,000.

 The Toughbook W4 weighs less than three pounds and features a tiny footprint of only 10.6 x 8.3 inches, but the 6 hours and 26 minutes of battery runtime is the feature that road warriors will love most. That time fell to 5 hours and 48 minutes when the Wi-Fi radio was switched on, but that’s still fantastic endurance.

The 802.11a/b/g Wi-Fi adapter offers solid performance. It yielded a strong 18.2 Mbps of throughput at 5 feet from our access point and held onto that bandwidth very well at 50 feet, offering a data transfer rate of 16.1 Mbps.

The display measures only 12.1 inches diagonally in order to accommodate the W4’s compact footprint, but the screen is bright and crisp, featuring an anti-glare coating that business users are sure to appreciate. Note that DVDs won’t look quite as good on this system as on ultraportables with a glossy coating. Don’t expect much from the W4’s audio system, either. The single monophonic speaker is tinny and we found it to be nearly inaudible at quieter moments in some movies.

Whether we were kicking back with a few DVDs or working in Excel, the Toughbook W4 offered good performance, but its 1.2-GHz Ultra Low Voltage Pentium M 753 processor proved a bit sluggish when we started working in more demanding applications, like Photoshop. Not surprisingly, MobileMark 2005 gave this ultraportable a midrange score of 175.

Aside from WinDVD 5 and B’s Clip 6 and Recorder Gold 8 Basic, there’s really no software installed on the system. On the plus side, Panasonic covers the W4 with a three-year standard parts and labor warranty.

At $2,149, the Panasonic W4 is one of the most expensive ultraportables that you can buy, but we believe its combination of durability, long battery life, and portability more than justifies the premium.