Digital Trends

Panasonic Toughbook W2 October 5th, 2003 | by Brandon King

Use and testing

Battery performance was nothing short of excellent. Estimated battery life according to Panasonic is 7.5 hours. Mobile Mark 2002 reported a 254 minute battery life (~4.2 hours), and our subjective experience would put it closer to 5 hours. The claim of 7.5 hours is entirely possible, when you take into account that we had all power saving features disabled.

The one category in which we saw a significant difference from the TR1A was screen quality. The viewing angles were also not as impressive as with the TR1A, but not bad either. There is signifigant light bleeding from the bottom of the screen which results in uneven illumination for the rest of the screen. The result is images being washed out at the bottom and correctly contrasted about 3/4 of the way up. We've included a picture of a solid black background to exaggerate the issue. Remember that the washing-out is not as significant as in the image, since the digital camera will attempt to ‘correct' the contrast.

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Performance-wise, the W2 did well in all tests. Mobile Mark 2002 scored it at 112, which is not bad, considering it only ships with 256MB RAM. The Silicon Motion Lynx 3DM video chipset was adequate for most jobs, but with 3DMark2001 score of 1766, don't expect Half Life 2 to run along at 60fps. SiSoftware Sandra showed the W2 edging out the TR1A in our CPU benchmarks.

The one big drawback to the W2 is that it is only available in the Land of the Rising Sun. As we mentioned, there are companies that will import the W2 into the US and install English versions of all the software, but you still have to contend with the barely-different-but-just-enough-so-to-be-annoying Japanese keyboard layout. It's QWERTY, but symbols and punctuation are mixed around a little. In all honesty, there are some nice changes to the keyboard layout, but if you work with more than one computer, it will just confuse you. Included in this review is a snapshot of the keyboard layout. Notice the ‘@' symbol is promoted to a non-shifted position.

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