14 DAY TRIAL // Panasonic officially introduced the FZ-A1 Toughpad tablet in Australia. Although the company recently backed away from the European smartphone market, it looks like Panasonic wishes to maintain its foothold in other regions, such as Australia.
The fierce competition on the tablet market is well-known among consumers and manufacturers, but Panasonic’s new rugged slate won’t have too many rivals on the market.
The FZ-A1 Toughpad tablet has been built to withstand even the harshest environments. Aimed at those who work in hazardous areas or in the field sales, emergency services and such, Panasonic’s tablet will be available for purchase in Australia for $1500/€1215.
At first glance, the tablet might seem heavily overpriced, but keep in mind that this is a “business rugged” slate which is MIL-STD 810G and IP65 compliant.
It can easily withstand drops from 120 cm/47 inch and will still operate at -10 °C/- 50°F. It is also worth mentioning that the FZ-A1 Toughpad features a water- and dust-proof body.
Hardware-wise, the tablet is equipped with a dual-core processor clocked at 1.2 GHz, which is manufactured by Marvell. In addition, the FZ-A1 Toughpad packs 1GB of RAM, 16GB of internal memory, as well as microSD card slot for memory expansion (up to 32GB).
Panasonic FZ-A1 Toughpad sports a 10.1-inch XGA capacitive touchscreen display that supports 1024 x 768 pixels resolution.
On the back, the slate features a 5-megapixel photo snapper with LED flash, while in the front there’s a secondary 2-megapixel camera for video calls.
The FZ-A1 Toughpad ships with Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich operating system out of the box and some pre-loaded apps and services, including Panasonic Utilities, McAfee Mobile Security (trial version), RedBend OMA-DM, AuthenTec QuickSec and Adobe Reader.
The tablet comes with Wi-Fi, satellite GPS and Bluetooth connectivity by default, but a 3G version is available as well. Check it out here.
