We've recently praised several mainstream laptops, such as the HP Spectre x360 14 and the Acer Chromebook Spin 713, for having screens with a taller 3:2 rather than 16:9 aspect ratio, requiring less scrolling of text and web pages. The Panasonic Toughbook 33 (starts at $3,599; $5,187 as tested) featured a 3:2 display at its debut back in 2017, not only for data viewing but to reduce the risk of its width blocking a police car's dashboard airbag. That kind of design detail tells you something: This specialized PC is made for very specific types of in-the-world deployment.
Panasonic's newly refreshed detachable 2-in-1 is a formidable example of a rugged laptop, built to survive in harm's way in the field, riding around in cars, or on factory floors. It's ponderous and pricey, but a well-nigh indestructible solution that goes toe to toe with last year's Dell Latitude 7220 Rugged Extreme Tablet. The Dell model's considerably lower cost and better battery life preserve its Editors' Choice award, but it's a near thing.
Built to Be Beaten Up
Like the 11.6-inch-screened Latitude, the 12-inch Toughbook 33 is a Windows 10 Pro tablet with an optional keyboard dock that turns it into a laptop. Both boast IP65 ingress protection, meaning they're proof against dust, dirt, and sandstorms, as well as rain, splashes, or jets of water, though not high-pressure hosedown or immersion.
The Dell is rated to survive drops from four feet; the Panasonic, five feet alone, or four feet if it's attached to its keyboard base. Compared with the Latitude, the Toughbook has a 10th Generation versus 8th Generation Intel processor and the HDMI and Ethernet ports its rival lacks, though neither has a Thunderbolt port.
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Toughbooks are sold by specialized resellers instead of consumer outlets like Best Buy and are subject to custom configurations and volume discounts. Panasonic's website lists an MSRP of $3,599 for the Toughbook 33 tablet with a Core i5-10310U processor, 16GB of RAM, and a 512GB NVMe solid-state drive (heated for use in cold weather, yet).
The $5,187 for our test unit nets you the company's Premium Keyboard and 4G mobile broadband support, compatible with the FirstNet first responders' network and Band 48 governmental LTE. (The system supports both nanoSIM and eSIM.) The company's publicist told us the tablet and keyboard have street prices of $3,200 and $600, respectively. Options include a Core i7-10810U CPU, 32GB of memory, and a 1TB SSD, as well as an array of docks and vehicle mounts, the latter often geared to implementation in law-enforcement or emergency-response vehicles.
Made of magnesium alloy surrounded by ABS and elastomer plastic, the Toughbook 33 tablet measures 0.9 by 12.1 by 9.6 inches and weighs a hefty 3.4 pounds, ballooning to 1.8 by 12.3 by 11.4 inches and 6.1 pounds with the keyboard. The Latitude slate is barely smaller (0.96 by 12.3 by 8 inches, 2.9 pounds). The Panasonic has two cameras: a 1080p face-recognition-capable webcam with a sliding privacy shutter above the screen, and an 8-megapixel (3,264 by 2,448) front-mounted camera for snapping photos in the field.
A fingerprint reader is mounted on the tablet's back, as is a latch giving access to the two hot-swappable batteries. A caddy on the right edge holds a two-button stylus pen. The ports are secured behind hinged, latched doors to keep out dust and moisture. There's an AC adapter connector on the right and an Ethernet jack, an HDMI output, USB 3.1 Type-A and -C ports, and an audio jack on the left. Wi-Fi 6 and Bluetooth 5.1 are standard.
Two latches secure the tablet to the keyboard base, which has a pull-out carrying handle. (It also serves to steady the top-heavy system in laptop mode.) The base has more ports: two USB-A 3.1 ports, an Ethernet jack, and a serial port on the right, and USB 2.0, HDMI, and VGA ports, plus an SD card slot and the power connector, on the left.
Stop, Drop, and Roll
The keyboard offers dim red backlighting, for use in low-light situations without overwhleming the eyes. You get real Home, End, Page Up, and Page Down keys instead of making you fuss with pairings of the Fn and arrow keys, but I wasted time searching for the Delete key at top right where it belongs before finally finding it on the bottom row. The keys have a solid, slightly wooden typing feel.
The two-button touchpad is very small. Like some other touchpads designed to work when used with gloves, it's hard to use with bare hands indoors, alternately ignoring and overreacting as you move or tap your finger. A supplied settings utility lets you configure the touch screen for use with bare, gloved, or wet fingers.
Buttons below the 2,160-by-1,440-pixel display let you launch programs or the Start menu, adjust volume, and toggle auto-rotate between landscape and portrait modes. (Oddly, the second of the two launch buttons ignored the function I chose in the settings utility, activating instead a flashlight on the top edge.) With a dazzling 1,200 nits of brightness, the panel is readable even in direct sunlight, with rich colors and good contrast. (You need to uncheck Windows' "Change brightness when lighting changes" box to see it at its peak.) The pen showed good palm rejection and kept up with fast scribbling and sketching.
The tablet's cameras are impressive, with the webcam not only exceeding the usual 720p resolution but capturing colorful, reasonably well-lit images even in relatively dim rooms. Stereo speakers produce loud but flat and tinny sound.
As usual when PCMag tests (borrowed) rugged gear, I didn't try to push the extreme limits of the Toughbook 33's hardiness. But I did drop it repeatedly, with and without the keyboard attached, onto a carpeted floor from a height of three or four feet. It laughed off every impact, although the tablet did separate once from the keyboard. Putting it in the kitchen sink and spraying the system with water didn't faze it a bit.
Testing the 2021 Toughbook: From the Field to the Testbench
Benchmark performance isn't a priority for rugged PCs. What's important isn't how quickly they can crunch through datasets or play 3D games, but how they hold up when dropped onto rocks or carried into a rain squall or snowstorms.
For the record, I measured the Toughbook 33's throughput against not only its closest competitor, the Dell Latitude 7220 detachable, but two rugged clamshell laptops: the 13.3-inch Getac B360, and the 14-inch Dell Latitude 7424 Rugged Extreme. The last spot went to a much lighter, non-rugged tablet, the 12.3-inch Microsoft Surface Pro 7+ for Business. You can see their basic specs in the table below.
Productivity and Media Tests
PCMark 10 is a holistic performance suite developed by the benchmark specialists at UL (formerly Futuremark). Its primary test simulates different real-world productivity and content-creation workflows. We use it to assess overall system performance for office-centric tasks such as word processing, spreadsheet work, web browsing, and videoconferencing. We also use a storage subtest from PCMark 8 to assess the speed of a system's boot drive, but the Toughbook 33 balked at it. (See more about how we test laptops.)
The Toughbook isn't destined to spend most of its time with Excel spreadsheets or Google Docs reports, but it delivers solid productivity, though it fell a bit short of the 4,000 points that we consider an excellent PCMark 10 score. It has ample power for everyday multitasking.
Next is Maxon's CPU-crunching Cinebench R15 test, which is fully threaded to make use of all available processor cores and threads. Cinebench stresses the CPU rather than the GPU to render a complex image. The result is a proprietary score indicating a PC's suitability for processor-intensive workloads.
Cinebench is often a good predictor of our Handbrake video editing benchmark, in which we put a stopwatch on systems as they transcode a brief movie from 4K resolution down to 1080p. It, too, is a tough test for multi-core, multi-threaded CPUs; lower times are better.
The Panasonic's Core i5-10310U is a quad-core, 1.7GHz (4.4GHz turbo) processor with Intel's vPro management technology. It's no record-setter, but it did well in these tests, outrunning the 8th Generation Core i7 chips in both Dells.
We also run a custom Adobe Photoshop image-editing benchmark. Using an early 2018 release of the Creative Cloud version of Photoshop, we apply a series of 10 complex filters and effects to a standard JPEG test image. We time each operation and add up the total (lower times are better). The Photoshop test stresses the CPU, storage subsystem, and RAM, but it can also take advantage of most GPUs to speed up the process of applying filters.
Now, mind you: Photoshop ranks high on the list of apps least likely ever to make an appearance on a rugged tablet like this one. The Toughbook trailed the field in this test, but it'll chug through almost any task if you're patient.
Graphics Tests
We test Windows systems' relative graphics muscle with two gaming simulations, 3DMark and Superposition. The first has two DirectX 11 subtests, Sky Diver and Fire Strike, suitable for mainstream PCs with integrated graphics and higher-end gaming rigs respectively. The second uses the Unigine engine to render and pan through a detailed 3D scene at two resolution and image-quality settings with results measured in frames per second (fps); 30fps is usually considered a fair target for smooth animation while avid gamers prefer 60fps or higher.
Intel UHD Graphics never surprises. The Toughbook was the lowest of the pack in these tests. None of these systems, not even the Latitude 7424 with its dedicated GPU, comes within a mile of what you'd get from a gaming laptop, but the Panasonic makes no pretense of being suitable for even casual gameplay or visual rendering and design. Of course, that is far from the point with this PC, or any of the others here.
Battery Rundown Test
Note that Panasonic offers the Toughbook 33 in several battery configurations, to be detailed below. We tested with the standard battery set shipped with the review sample.
After fully recharging the laptop, we set up the machine in power-save mode (as opposed to balanced or high-performance mode) where available and make a few other battery-conserving tweaks in preparation for our unplugged video rundown test. (We also turn Wi-Fi off, putting the laptop into airplane mode.) In this test, we loop a video—a locally stored 720p file of the Blender Foundation short film Tears of Steel—with screen brightness set at 50% and volume at 100% until the system quits.
Despite its dual batteries, the Toughbook disappointed us, showing less stamina than the others. It'll get through a reasonably long session in the field, but first responders and military personnel will need to either carry additional swappable batteries or opt for the extra-cost long-life (4,120mAh) batteries instead of the standard (1,990mAh) cells that came in our test unit. [Editors' note: See the update at the end of this review regarding some additional battery testing done after this review was published; the long-life batteries, which Panasonic sent after initial publication, endured for a bit more than 21 hours.]
Hit It With Your Best Shot
Panasonic claims the Toughbook 33 is the best-selling fully rugged laptop or tablet, and it's a worthy choice—well-equipped, versatile, and supremely sturdy. It almost steals our Editors' Choice award from the Latitude 7220 Rugged Extreme Tablet for its newer CPU, slightly larger 3:2 screen, and HDMI port (though these machines aren't often used at a desk with an external monitor). But it's more expensive, and its battery life, at least with Panasonic's standard cells, is a letdown.
Still, if we ever have a 180-degree personality change and find ourselves running toward trouble instead of away from it, we'd be glad to have a Toughbook with us.
[Update, March 10, 2021: After our review was published, Panasonic sent a second, otherwise identical Toughbook 33 tablet with the optional long-life batteries (and a bulging rear panel to accommodate them), which, according to the company, would add $40 to the system's cost. The difference was dramatic, with runtime in our unplugged battery rundown test soaring from 8 hours and 28 minutes to 21 hours and 32 minutes—enough to make the bigger batteries a must-have accessory, though they do add bulk.]
In or out of its keyboard dock, Panasonic's 2021 refresh of its Toughbook 33 tablet is built to take all the hardships a first responder or field worker can dish out.
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