Panasonic's tough new anti-Eee pc
PANASONIC THINKS EEE PCS are for cissies and has today unveiled a notebook it says is worthy of real men. The rugged, hardy, strong Toughbook CF-U1, is the latest UMPC to be added to the company’s Toughbook line.
Able to survive drops from 1.20 metres, encased in a magnesium and plastic casing, sealed with rubber around the edges, the Toughbook is the Eee PC of working men. Men who hike and camp in the woods and don’t shower very often.
Purportedly immune to dust, water and other particles, anyone planning a holiday to the Sahara or the Australian outback just shouldn’t be without one really.
Based on Intel's tiddly Atom processor and boasting a tiny 5.6-inch LED backlit LCD touch screen, which Panasonic says can be viewed in direct sunlight, the entire unit is 7.2 inches wide by 5.9 inches deep by 2.2 inches high. Tough and trim, the hard man’s tiny laptop weighs in at only 1.06 kgs. Running on either Windows XP or Vista, the CF-U1 uses a solid state hard drive and is completely fanless too. Because real men don’t need cissy fans.
The two batteries provided with the CF-U1 purportedly give out 9 hours of juice and can be "hot-swapped", meaning a battery can be taken out to be replaced without having to turn off the whole system.
Other features (most of which are optional for added cost) include a two megapixel Webcam, fingerprint scanner, barcode and RFID readers, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, GPS and 3G-mobile-broadband.
It also has a PC charging cradle with a dust and water-resistant connector.
But if there’s one thing that really separates the Toughbook, tough man's PC from the daintier, girlier eee, it’s the price. At $2,499 (about six times the price of an eee), even if you’re a real man, it still brings a lump to the throat and tears to ones eyes. µ
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Even a "Manly" Man would have to take it in the rear to belive that the unfortunately named, c-FU-1 Laptop works any better that a eeePC !!! I wonder, can a "ToughBook" take a bullet ???
are built like the proverbial brick shithouses. I have just refurbished 4 Toughbooks for the local constabulary and the wireless cards wont work when the cover on the PCMCIA port is closed cos the whole damn thing is metal and weighs a ton. But you know for nearly $3000 you can get 9 maybe 10 eee's. Does that make them a disposable item?
They may be rugged but they're never worth the cost.

I work in an industry where these and the larger toughbooks are the ideal target and our laptops are regularly damaged.

But at 4 to 10 times the price the cost cannot be justified, you'd be suprised how much abuse a standard laptop can take and with the advent of SSD's they're becoming even more robust.

In addition a standard laptop with accidental damage cover and worldwide 24Hr replacement is significantly cheaper than a toughbook.

Also they are not indestructable and the usual scenarios where they are damaged (run over by an excavator!) no laptop is going to withstand.
Panasonic already made real nice laptops 30 years ago. You had to lift more than 10 kg, though, but you could not break these things. And they ran CP/M (the operating system that was later somehow copied and sold as MS-DOS) on a Zilog Z-80 processor.

BTW it should read kg, not kgs. And it would be nice to get the size of the screen in cm^2 (length times height). Isn't there an Inquirer Guide for the metric impaired?
Pity they're running such a girly OS. I mean, Dimdows, seriously!? Linux From Scratch FTW!
For 99% of people an eeepc is more suitable for them, however, these are basically your only option where an Intrinsically safe electrical device must be used (Read: Oil & Gas industry). These guys don't even flinch at a $2.5k price tag with the budgets they have.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intrinsic_safety