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 Panasonic Toughbook CF-W5 Price:
$2,300
By Jamie Bsales 
Road warriors who want next-gen wireless broadband in a travel-friendly laptop will do well with the Panasonic Toughbook CF-W5. This ultraportable isn't cheap, but it delivers excellent WWAN throughput via Sprint's EV-DO Rev. A network.
The CF-W5 has some welcome features for frequent travelers. It weighs only 3.1 pounds and includes a built-in optical drive cleverly tucked beneath the keyboard. And as part of Panasonic's business-rugged line (the company also offers semi-rugged and rugged laptops), the unit has a tough magnesium-alloy shell and a shock-mounted hard drive. You will find some minor tradeoffs for its size and weight, however. To accommodate the top-mounted optical drive, Panasonic has squished the keyboard vertically. That makes for rectangular rather than square keys, so touch typists will have to adjust. And while the round touchpad and contoured mouse buttons make a design statement, a traditional setup would be easier to use. The CF-W5's 12.1-inch screen is an old-style 4:3 panel, and the matte finish cuts down on glare in bright light. Still, we've grown to prefer the look of a glossy widescreen. Application performance from the 1.66-GHz Intel Core Duo processor was underwhelming, with a MobileMark 2005 score of 187. For $2,249, we would prefer a faster Core 2 Duo CPU, which would deliver in the low- to mid-200s on MobileMark 2005. On the other hand, battery life was stellar. The CF-W5 truly delivers all-day runtime: a whopping 11 hours with wireless off, and almost 8 hours connected via WWAN. The 60GB hard drive, however, is acceptable in a budget model or a tiny device like the OQO, but not in a machine this pricey. On our wireless broadband testing, the Toughbook CF-W5 excelled in each scenario we threw at it. We measured a max upload throughput of 495.5 Kbps (the best we saw from any model here). Its download speeds, topping out at 566.4 Kbps, were less stellar but still impressive. Where the CF-W5 really excelled was on our low-signal strength test, in which we took each system to New York's Penn Station. In this environment, surfing via the WWAN connection was better than average, with CNN.com loading in 35 seconds, and video clips showing smooth playback, which means you'll be able to keep working in many places where other notebooks slow to a crawl. The Toughbook W5 is our favorite mobile broadband notebook. Its fast WWAN performance, light weight, durability, and excellent battery life make it appealing to people who spend more time on the road than in the office. Compare Prices | Panasonic Toughbook CF-W5 Specifications
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