Oy vey! Today must be some industry-wide Windows 7 announcement day, as Panasonic is hot on the heels of
Dell and
Toshiba with no less than six lappies set to sport Vista's agile younger sibling. The Let's Note (
ToughBook, to you and us) F8, R8, T8 and W8 models are likely to take on the new OS without alterations to
their hardware, but the hot news comes in the form of the brand new N8 and S8. Powered by Core 2 Duo P8700 chips, both machines will come with 12.1-inch WXGA LCD screens, 250GB HDDs, up to 4GB of RAM,
WiMAX, WiFi, HDMI and SDHC connectivity. They also share a stonking claim of 16 hours of battery life, and the one feature that distinguishes between them is the internal DVD burner on the S8. All that goodness will be out come October 22, with expected pricing around ¥200,000 (about $2,230) for the N series. You'll find a gallery of the unveiling event at the
Akihabara News link below.
[Via
Akihabara News]
posted Sep 29th 2009 7:32AM
Oh cool, a cup holde... Oh wait... WAIT! :S
Piece of crap....
Panasonic should release a plasma screen laptop. :) 42 inches of LOVE!
ew
junk
FUGLY, and expensive....that is all I can say...
Yep, couldn't believe the old school DVD drive. But seriously, waaay overpriced for what you're getting.
they used their cordless phones for design inspiration
Dear Panasonic - let the 90's rest when it comes to laptop design. Seriously.
i hate to be brutally honest, but that is hideous.
your not the only one. I would believe if R&D dept. announce they designed this laptop as ugly as they could think of.
i love to be brutally honest, except when trying to court women.
The 5th photo of the gallery - seriously? Cluttering the desktop, deskbar and taskbar with crap for new customers. What a way to introduce their new product!
Wow. I didn't even know Panasonic made laptops. I wish I still didn't know.
And on the opposite end of the spectrum, I'm glad I did. There's a reason they're called Toughbooks when sold in America. Oh, and they're spill-resistant.
Sony must've had some flip-top PS2 drives they needed to get rid of.
Facepalm win.
Annnnnd comment system fail apparently.
Welcome to Engadget.
I like how short the space bar is.. That's about it.
Those things were pretty popular in Japan from what I saw, a bunch of salarymen were using them on the bullet train and stuff. Ugly as hell and terrible design though, from the ones I played with in the electronics stores they felt really badly built too.
I had a look at one of these in a shop in Tottenham Court Road the other day (may have been older model - appears to have same case) - I've seen little kiddies "my first laptops" with better build quality than these things. For a start, the CD drives never seem to close quite all the way.
Believe me, they only feel that way when you sweat the small stuff. Mine has survived being drop-kicked. And the newest ones are spill-proof.
If these are the same as NA's "Toughbooks", are there/were there any actually good looking Toughbooks? ...Ever?
Yeah, they're the same series. They don't look good, but they'll take quite a bit of abuse.
wow too expensive :/. i would go for the vaios
They have the older version of this at my job, they are super lightweight and touchscreen, not worth getting anywhere else but a business
It looks like they took the MacBook Wheel design, but also keep the keyboard!
No Betamax player built in????
I didn't think anyone actually used a circular touchpad. What an ineffective use of space :X
they are really cool. my friends in japan use them all day long. the toughbooks are really cool roadwarrior notebooks and the build quality is nice as well. i wish they would be easier to get in europe. I would definitly buy one . besides there is much crappier stuff available from dell and others.
1992 called and it wants that design back.
Ohh it should have been called let's not ;) Someone can shop it if they want ;)
These are business oriented laptops. The series is extremely popular among Japanese businessmen. I had the earliest W2 model for more than 6 years. It is still one of the lightest and long-lasting laptop with a totally unique optical drive bay even to date.
I used to use a Panasonic W4 Toughbook at my last job and found it to be an excellent machine. I agree that the light weight and unique optical drive made it a pleasure to work with while traveling. If I hadn't had two personal laptops at home already I would have bought it off of the company when I left. Very nice...I hope to someday pick up another.
Let's come up with a better name