Panasonic Toughbook 19

[usafcap1]

via USAF or civilian companies.

[Eclipse]

No.

Toughbooks are generally underpowered for the price, which is usually about 3 times a regular notebook.  We don't do enough field ops to justify the cost.

[sarflyer]

My PD uses CF29's and 30's and at $3600 per unit it's a little pricey.  Do you really need a Toughbook?

[EMT-83]

Yep, the Toughbooks are dogs. We have them in our fire apparatus.

The touch screens are cool, and they'll take abuse, but they're so freakin' slow.

[Eclipse]

A million years ago when I worked for a municipality, the village cheaped out on their first installs of notebooks in their PD and FD vehicles, which replaced
mobile data terminals.  The machines we deployed were higher-end business-class notebooks, but nothing special.

The ones in the police cars, which had full suspensions, tended to hold up pretty well, but the ones in the fire trucks, especially the engines and ladder trucks, which for all intent and purpose have no suspension, would last about 6 months and then they'd be toast.

As I recall, the mounting dock for a Toughbook was as much as the whole notebook would cost these days.   

For most CAP applications, a decent tablet or an iPad would serve the purpose for the stuff we'd be doing in a vehicle or the field.

[N Harmon]

I have one I use for CAP. Has topo maps and a web browser. If I needed to replace it today, I'd probably get an android tablet.

[sarflyer]

I work on toughbooks daily and the key is to max out the ram the minute you get it.  The other key is to not have a lot of crap loading up on boot and running in the back ground.   The HD's are standard SATA laptop drives that have been encased in a protective holder which does a pretty good job.

I was holding a CF29 once walking out to a patrol car and tripped causing me to toss the laptop about 15 feet onto concrete.  Yes it was running and it was still running afterwards.  But also I have pulled laptops out of crashed patrol cars that the hard drive was toast. 

The focus of the laptop is to make it "tough" and it does a pretty good job of that.  Performance is another issue.

If someone is seriously thinking about purchasing them I would be happy chat with ya about Toughbooks. 

Let me know off line at my normal email below.

[bflynn]

The vision presented at MER / NCWG conference a few weeks ago was to have toughbooks linked to satphone capabilities so we could process just taken pictures in the airplane and upload them to wimrs prior to landing.

I suppose that could work, but I'm wondering if there's really a need to deliver images within an hour as opposed to 2-3 hours?  It seems like a lot of cost and effort to shave a couple of hours off the time.

[Eclipse]

Sounds like a re-hashed SDIS, which is still in use, but all but retired because of issues with the satellites.  I can't imagine why toughbooks would be necessary as any notebook or tablet could do the job just as well.

The likely successor to SDIS is GIIEP, which does use Toughbooks because the systems were spec'ed for the military and ours came from AFNORTH, but we won't use it in a "Toughbook kind of way", and we could scale-up the systems by scaling down the specs.

With a little regulatory relief we could do what GIIEP does some consumer-grade cell phones.

[Slim]

If anyone's really interested in just how "Tough" these things are, let me know and I'll grab a few pictures.  We run 30 of them in our ambulances, most of them about two years old, and they are literally beaten to a pulp.  I cringe every time I see one of our medics swinging the thing around by the screen/lid, or dropping one on the cement floor in the garage.  When I say something, I get a blank stare and a shrug of the shoulders (also known as the EMS salute), and the response is usually "Oh well, that's why it's a Toughbook."  Software wise, ours are pretty well stripped down to the bare essentials (XP Pro, our billing/reporting software, MCI triage software mandated by med control, and very few others), and they're still dogs. 

We're not even buying them anymore, we found a cheaper alternative that is twice the computer that the Toughbooks are.

[Майор Хаткевич]

Sounds to me like Toughbook R&D stopped a decade ago.

[Eclipse]

Sounds to me like Toughbook R&D stopped a decade ago.

There's some non-trivial limitations to the platform - touch screens, sealed cases to keep out moisture and dirt increase the internal heat
and limit the processor, only certain drives meet the performance specs for abuse, etc., not to mention that notebooks in general
are better constructed these days then a decade ago.

That and the fact that hardware is effectively "free" these days, means that unless you're talking about a legitimate hard-case environment
where you actually expect to run it over with a tank, any department with people who can even moderately respect their equipment is better
off with 5 cheapies vs. one under-powered Toughbook.

Not to mention that a smartphone, tablet, or even an iOS device in an Otterbox can do just about everything a Toughbook would do in the field,
is just about as touch, and still 1/3 the price.

[Slim]

Not to mention that a smartphone, tablet, or even an iOS device in an Otterbox can do just about everything a Toughbook would do in the field,
is just about as touch, and still 1/3 the price.

We recently found out that the vendor that supplies our billing/reporting/CAD software has an iPad app, but not android yet.  We've been discussing the benefits of switching to them, with a heavy duty protective case.  Jury's still out at the moment.