At an event in New York City, Panasonic announced its new rugged detachable PC, the ToughBook 33. Priced from $3,649, the convertible notebook is meant to survive the most extreme conditions.
At an event held in New York City today, Panasonic unveiled the Toughbook 33, iterating on the success of its Toughbook 20 and 31 series of devices. In fact, the firm first showed it off at Mobile World Congress in February, although certain minor things have changed.
This device is a detachable, meaning that you can remove the display from the keyboard. It’s meant for those that work in the field, so you can drop it (MIL-STD-810G tested) , or you can spill a can of Coke all over it and spray it off with a hose so it doesn’t get sticky. You can also see from the image above that the touchscreen works with gloves on, so workers in the field can use it without removing their gear.
The Toughbook 33 comes with four choices of processors, a Core i5 or i7, with either one available in Intel’s sixth-generation Skylake or seventh-generation Kaby Lake variants. The reason for the Skylake availability is so you can downgrade to Windows 7 if you need to; however, all of these devices will ship with Windows 10.
Obviously, all of the guts of the device are in the display, including two batteries, which can be hot-swapped, meaning that you can actually change the batteries in the field without ever having to power down the Toughbook. There are two different keyboards available, a slim one and a larger one with a handle; as you’d imagine, it gets a bit top-heavy with the Lite keyboard, but on the larger one, the handle actually pops out to make it more stable.
It’s clear that Panasonic put a lot of thought into the Toughbook 33, right down to the pins that connect the display to the keyboard.
Unlike many devices with such connectors, those pins won’t corrode, according to Panasonic. You can also spill water in there, although it’s the one part of the device where you wouldn’t want to let it collect.
The Toughbook 33 starts at $3,649 for the set of the tablet and the keyboard, although just the tablet will also be available; according to the announcement from February, that will be $3,499. The device will be available later on this month.
