Digital Trends

Panasonic Toughbook R7

March 14th, 2008 | by Josh Norem

Use and Testing

We’ve sampled a lot of notebooks in our time, but we’ve never felt a notebook this small and light. Even the Apple MacBook Air feels porky compared to the Toughbook. Despite its light weight, it still feels very durable, as if you could toss it into your backpack without any worries.

We booted it up and were surprised to see it reach the Windows XP desktop in a scant 0:35 seconds, which is probably the fastest we’ve ever seen a system boot. We actually got a little teary-eyed reminiscing on how fast XP runs on low-end hardware compared to Vista.

Once booted into Windows, we liked that it was a totally clean installation of the OS. There was no bloatware installed at all. The only pre-installed programs were Skype and some Panasonic utilities that allow for tweaking settings related to battery life.

Battery Life

As we stated before, Panasonic claims 8 hours of battery life on the R7, so naturally we expected it to be a bit less in the “real world.” Interestingly, Dynamism (the importer) recognizes this truism on its website where it states, “The 8 hour standard battery life is remarkable (even when reduced to a real world 4-5 hours of use).” Sure enough, we tested it by surfing the Net and listening to music, and squeezed 5 hours and 17 minutes out of the R7 with screen brightness set to the middle setting. Despite not being the claimed eight hours, this is still very good battery life.

General Performance

For standard office tasks the R7 was always fast and responsive. XP runs like the dickens on 1GB of RAM and a decent processor, and we never experienced any slowdowns or problems at all. The 10.4” LCD actually seems rather spacious given how small the notebook is, and its 1024x768 native resolution seemed adequate. The display is a bit old school though, in that it has a 4:3 aspect ratio and a matte covering to reduce glare.

The only thing that bothered us when using it for general tasks was the keyboard is really small. A lot of the keys are much smaller than normal, which is to be expected, but it makes touch-typing difficult. Though it’d be fine for jotting down notes in a meeting we wouldn’t want to write a thesis on it. We also imagine it probably gets easier to use with practice. We should also note that there are a few keys with Japanese characters on them, but none of the standard keys are missing.

The keyboard is quite small, but all the major keys are present. There’s even a few Japanese keys.