Panasonic Toughbook CF-S9 - A Very Tough Book

A Very Tough Book

It’s been quite awhile since we laid hands on a Panasonic Toughbook, and we managed to get our hands on the newer Panasonic Toughbook CF-S9, which is a 12.1-inch notebook that seems to be only available in Japan at the moment, but will soon be launching in Singapore on the 17th of September. In fact, Singapore will be the first country outside of Japan to get this model, while the folks in United States will only get it at the end of September.

Now, do note this is actually a rugged business notebook, as opposed to a true rugged Toughbook, but you’ll still be getting decent protection for your device. It can stand up to the rigors of most day-to-day incidents like spilled coffee on the keyboard, or a sudden drop from table height. While it offers some protection, it's still not  a good idea to drop your notebook from table height, yeah?

We’ve seen most of the notebook's safety features in a previous review unit via the CF-W8 model which is available here. If you noticed, the design of the unit has hardly changed and it looks quite similar to other Toughbooks, especially the CF-W8. That said, the 12.1-inch CF-W8 uses an Intel Ultra Low Voltage Core 2 Duo processor, while the new CF-S9 uses an Intel Core i5 processor, so expect the newcomer's performance to be outstanding. Let’s take a quick look at the exterior before we delve straight into the interior design and the performance of the Toughbook CF-S9.

Tough Interior

Inside, you’ll find the same hardy build that you’ll find in other Toughbooks. Although it’s been almost two years since we’ve last tried a previous Panasonic Toughbook, the similar interior keyboard design, circular trackpad, and optical drive placement remains the same. So if you’ve seen one business rugged Toughbook, you’ve probably seen them all. That said, let's still take a take a closer look. Our review set is from Japan, but will be exactly the same as the local retail model bar the Japanese keyboard that you can see in the pictures.

Tough Performance

With a nice bump in processing capabilities, the Toughbook CF-S9 should do pretty well with the Intel Core i5 processor. Whether this will affect the battery life of the unit, we’ll find out more in the next page. For now, here's the competition that we’ll be pitting the Panasonic notebook against in our benchmark performance testing.

PCMark Vantage

Against a similar specced HP ProBook 6440b, the CF-S9 does pretty well here. The Dell Vostro comes packed with a discrete graphics chip and a 7200RPM HDD, so it's no surprise to find the notebook scoring much better. That said, the CF-S9 doesn't disappoint and is pretty much what you expect for its internal configuration. Also note that we're skipping 3DMark06 testing since the unit we're testing uses Intel's integrated graphics, and you aren't going to be gaming on this device anyway.

Tough Battery

Given what we know about the benchmark performance so far, it seems that the Panasonic Toughbook CF-S9 has the performance portion nailed down. Now we’ll see if battery life has been affected with its new processing capabilities or will the notebook last the distance in our battery test.

If you aren’t familiar with our testing procedures, our DVD battery test is a simple one where we put turn off all wireless features, then set brightness and volume to 50% while looping a DVD movie till the notebook conks out. Amazingly, the CF-S9 lasted pretty long at 343 minutes, or 5 hours 43 minutes. That’s definitely more than enough time to be do anything without recharging the battery.

As for its power consumption, since the notebook doesn’t have a discrete graphics unit, we’re looking at a very low figure of just 15.60W. Quite impressive to be honest, and it speaks well of the unit's portability. Let’s take a look at our next set of results with the Portability Index to verify our deductions.

Our Portability Index is basically a ratio that's derived with the notebook's uptime divided by the product of the unit's weight and volume. The resulting ratio, where the higher the figure, the more portable a notebook is. As can be seen from our graphs, the combination of its light weight, delightful battery life and decent dimensions make this notebook eminently portable; in fact almost bordering the figures of a netbook, but is much more powerful in terms of performance.

Tough Not to Buy

If you are someone who travels a lot, and requires something to match your travelling lifestyle, then you're probably already considering getting a business rugged notebook with a good battery life that you can carry around with ease. Panasonic’s Toughbook range fits the bill, and the CF-S9 is just what the notebook doctor ordered.

With its decent performance thanks to its Intel Core i5 internals, great battery life and portability scores, the Toughbook is one notebook that stands out in a field of other business rugged notebooks, given their efforts in this business. Panasonic has been at this for a while now, and though their notebooks are designed quite similarly, they've got a great formula going with a strict business flair.

So if you've convinced yourself that you do need an awesome business notebook like the Toughbook CF-S9, then you’ll need to get your wallet (or the company budget) ready. The CF-S9 isn’t cheap, at S$2,799, but you’ll definitely be getting your money’s worth in return, and you can rest easy knowing it’s well spent on a Toughbook.

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