Product Reviews

Some of Panasonic's Toughbook range may look as though they've been made out of JCB digger parts, but they are tough enough to survive day-to-day use in such inhospitable environments as building sites. The CF-Y5, however, is described by Panasonic as being "semi-ruggedised", and is designed for those who travel regularly and want a notebook that'll survive a few bumps and scrapes.

The magnesium alloy chassis is designed to withstand weights of up to 100kg. We got one of our heavier writers to stand on it and it suffered no ill effects. Dropping the notebook from 30cm and pouring water over the keyboard also did no damage.

Despite being tough, the CF-Y5 is incredibly light at only 1.5kg. It's not the lightest ultra-portable we've seen, but considering it's got a built-in optical drive and 14.1in display, it's one of the most impressive. The whole notebook is very slender, too, although there are two raised strips on the lid that help protect the display.

The battery is fairly compact and doesn't jut out of the back of the chassis. However, at 60.7Wh it has a higher capacity than

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any of the batteries in last month's Labs. The CF-Y5 uses a low-voltage processor, and managed an amazing five hours and 37 minutes in our light usage battery test. It's one of the best times we've ever seen, and a spare battery should give you a working day's worth of power.

Opening the lid reveals the unusual layout. The DVD writer is loaded from the top, with access from a hatch below the keyboard and beside the touch pad. The keyboard is good, and the keys have enough feedback to make typing long documents comfortable. The round touch pad means you'll often have to reposition your finger to reach the corners of the screen.

The display has a native resolution of 1,440x1,050, so it's ideal for working with big spreadsheets or image files. There's a little graininess, but this isn't unusual with anti-glare finishes, and at least you won't suffer unwanted reflections from bright light sources. Viewing angles aren't terribly impressive, but our greyscale and colour wheel tests looked great when viewed head on.

The Intel Core Duo L2400 processor runs at 1.66GHz, and with 512MB of memory it's easily quick enough for office tasks. Adding an extra 512MB will make it capable of memory-intensive tasks such as photo-manipulation. However, the hard disk holds only 60GB, which is fine for office work but will fill up quickly with large media files.

The CF-Y5 feels great to use and the battery life and high-resolution screen are both outstanding. However, it costs over £900 more than our favourite ultra-portable, Lenovo's X60s. That said, if you think that a normal notebook won't survive your working week, then you've little choice but to spend the extra.