Review: Panasonic Toughbook CF-Y5 notebook

The Toughbook CF-Y5 is Panasonic's latest foray into the corporate rugged-laptop market where businesses might not mind paying a little bit more for something that will last.

One of the first things we noticed was its weight. Including the power supply the notebook weighs just 1.95kg, which is superb for a 14.1in LCD based laptop with an inbuilt DVD writer.

Special tricks include being able to withstand a 100kg mass placed on top of the laptop. We tested this with a large hardback book to distribute the weight across the lid (at Panasonic's insistence) and when an 80kg PCW staff writer stood on it the ribbed-LCD back depressed to take some of the strain, and the notebook seemed to cope with it fine.

The CF-Y5 is also splash-resistant and Panasonic was happy for us to pour a cup of water across the keyboard to test this out. Water seeps through two holes beneath the keyboard but the majority of the water seemed to flow straight off the side of the keyboard. The laptop continued to function normally, but we did notice a little bit of water had trickled into the DVD drive.

The notebook can also be dropped from a height of 30cm, although this isn't spectacular in any sense - most laptop falls are likely to be from a desk more than double that height.

Despite its tough-guy features, the CF-Y5 is a very attractive notebook. As on the CF-W5, the circular mousepad is small but it works well, while the scroll function lets it act just like an iPod click-wheel.

At the laptop's heart lies a low-voltage Core Duo L2400 processor running at 1.66GHz with 2MB L2 cache. Although this dual core chip may appear defunct next to Core 2 Duo processors with 4MB cache, low-voltage Core 2 Duo chips have only just started to appear so it's no surprise to see the CF-Y5 shipping with this CPU.

Performance is adequate for the majority of system tasks. In Sysmark 2004 SE it knocked out an unremarkable, yet capable score of 171. The laptop scored a disappointing 2,547 in PCmark05 - a score we'd associate with high-end Pentium M systems from yesteryear.

Read the  CF-Y5's full performance results and see how it compares with other notebooks we've tested.

In the battery reader test, which simulates a document being read continuously, the laptop lasted for an astonishing six hours and three minutes. In our DVD playback battery test the laptop ran for four hours 24 minutes, making it capable of playing back two long films without a problem.

The 14.1in LCD has a native resolution of 1,400x1,050 pixels giving plenty of desktop real-estate for documents. Unlike the CF-W5 and other Toughbook laptops the backlight bleed, which results in an apparent gradient of colour near the bottom of a screen, is barely noticeable on this model.

The screen is powered by Intel GMA950 integrated graphics that dynamically grabs up to 224MB of system memory. Few prospective Toughbook customers will be interested in gaming and, as expected, it returned very low scores in our tests - 369 in 3Dmark05 and 6fps (frames per second) in Far Cry.

The supplied 512MB of DDR2 553MHz Ram is stingy and we'd much prefer 2GB at this price point; an upgrade to at least 1GB is definitely recommended. A 60GB shock-resistant hard disk is also included, while a single PC card slot and SD slot are also available.

The keyboard is impressive for a laptop of this size. Keys are firm with no sponginess at all and no space is wasted with the keyboard filling out close to the edges of the laptop.

It doesn't have a dedicated numpad, which is to be expected, but at 28.5cm wide it is as big as most laptop keyboards (without the numpad) - even a 20in monster laptop from Rock we're currently testing. The only key that is noticeably smaller is the spacebar, but it is still very usable.

With an improved screen over previous Toughbooks, a dual-core processor and its all-round sturdiness, we liked this CF-Y5 Toughbook even more than the CF-W5. However, nothing can overshadow the fact Panasonic is charging £1,928 for a laptop with a Core Duo L2400 and just 512MB Ram.

An integrated 3G HSDPA slot for mobile broadband can be added, but the price then rises to an eye-watering £2,260. It's a shame, since if it were just a few hundred pounds cheaper and had 2GB Ram, we'd have no reservations recommending this laptop.

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Panasonic Toughbook CF-W5
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