The Panasonic Toughpad: Where Sleek And Strong Meet

By Sarah Howland, Editor In Chief, Field Technologies magazine

Early this year, I wrote a column about the iPad's role in field service (to read the article click here). It seemed at that time that while the tablet form factor was going to remain popular throughout 2011 and beyond, the iPad just isn't tough enough for many of the outside-the-four-walls applications we cover. At the end of the column I posed the question - what about a rugged iPad? While such a product hasn't been introduced, I recently witnessed the introduction of a product that combines the style of the popular form factor with the ruggedness required by many enterprise applications – the Panasonic Toughpad A1. At the Panasonic Toughpad A1 launch at Dallas Cowboys Stadium in early November, president Rance Poehler gave a presentation full of interesting statistics. First, according to IDC, tablet sales are expected to reach $70 million in 2012. And while only 21% of companies are purchasing tablets for their employees currently, 51% are expected to be within one year (according to a Morgan Stanley Research survey). There's no doubt that the introduction of the iPad launched the tablet form factor into extreme popularity, in fact 73.4% of tablet sales in 2011 were of the Apple iPad. That said, as discussed in the column mentioned above, the iPad isn't built for many enterprise applications. Panasonic's launch of the Toughpad A1 is targeted as a solution to that problem. As Poehler said during his presentation, "it's the first tablet designed for business."

The 10", Android-based Toughpad A1 is targeted toward highly mobile outdoor workers in markets like aviation, construction, field sales, and the public sectors, who are exposed to extreme conditions and whose mission critical applications necessitate avoiding failures at all cost. The Toughpad A1's high brightness, 10.1" XGA capacitive, multi-touch, daylight-viewable screen can benefit mobile workers in markets like supply chain logistics, utilities, and the military, who can easily view critical data and operate the device regardless of lighting conditions. The Toughpad A1 offers a stylus and active digitizer, enabling flexible data entry in the field, as well as signature capture and handwriting recognition functionalities — features that can benefit sales, customer service, and mobile point-of-service environments. "We have the unique ability to apply our market knowledge, intellectual property, engineering, and R&D resources to deliver an Android-powered tablet that is radically different from the largely consumer-based devices on the market today. The Toughpad tablet is developed from the inside out to address the needs of the business users," says Poehler.

The Toughpad A1 is designed to meet many of the same durability standards as Panasonic's Toughbook PC product line. The devices have MIL-STD-810G ratings for drops as well as ingress protection ratings for resistance to dust and water. The Toughpad A1 offers optional 4G (LTE or WiMAX) mobile broadband as well as Bluetooth v2.1 + EDR, 802.11a/b/g/n Wi-Fi and satellite GPS. The device incorporates security embedded at the hardware level and offers technologies like hardware and software encryption, enhanced VPN, dual factor authentication, trusted boot, and device management. Besides having access to the existing selection of Android Market applications, the Toughpad A1 is supported by the Business AppPortal, an enterprise-focused app store offering best-of-breed vertical market specific solutions as well as applications addressing broad enterprise concerns, including MDM (mobile device management), security, and virtualization. For more on the Toughbook A1's features and functionality, click here.

I had the chance to use the Toughpad A1 while attending the product launch, and in my opinion, Panasonic has done a good job of combining many of the features and functionality that users are seeking as IT becomes more consumerized while retaining the ruggedness that the company's products are known for. In fact, according to PC Magazine, the average failure rate of a device is 13%, the iPad has a failure rate of 15%, and Panasonic has an average failure rate of only 2%. As the tablet market continues to boom in 2012, it'll be interesting to see how the Toughpad A1 is received. The Toughpad A1 will be available in the spring of 2012 starting at $1299. Panasonic also plans to launch a 7" version of the tablet, the Toughpad B1, which will be released later in 2012. For more information, visit www.panasonic.com/toughpad.