At 10.1 inches, the Panasonic Toughbook G2 ($2,999 alone; $3,594 with keyboard) is considerably smaller than most other Windows tablets like the 12.3-inch Microsoft Surface Pro 7 or Lenovo ThinkPad X12 Detachable, yet it’s much heavier at 2.9 pounds. On the other hand, try taking one of those tablets out in pouring rain or dropping it from shoulder height, and you’ll be sorry. With its detachable keyboard, the G2 qualifies as a rugged laptop for first responders and field workers, able to shrug off tremendous abuse. It can also be fitted with optional modules—Panasonic cites 36 possible combinations—ranging from a barcode reader to a thermal camera that lets firefighters find hidden hotspots in a smoldering structure. It just misses Editors’ Choice honors, partly because we think its 12-inch Toughbook 33 sibling is easier to read, but it’s a formidable ally for soldiers, police, and emergency crews headed into harm’s way.
There’s a Slate That Leads a Life of Danger…
The Toughbook G2 is a top-to-bottom overhaul of a 2013 tablet called the Toughpad G1, with a 10th instead of 3rd Generation Intel Core i5 processor and 16GB instead of 2GB of RAM. (You can replace its Core i5-10310U vPro CPU with a Core i7-10810U, upgrade its 512GB solid-state drive to a 1TB unit, and double its memory to 32GB when ordering.) Our test unit came with the $595 backlit keyboard. A Philips screwdriver lets you install the top-edge expansion modules—Panasonic calls them “xPAKs”—which range from $65 for an additional USB port to $1,050 for the thermal camera.
Measuring 1.1 by 11 by 7.4 inches, the tablet is made from magnesium alloy with ABS and elastomer edges. The closest competitor we’ve tested, the 11.6-inch Dell Latitude 7220 Rugged Extreme Tablet, is 0.96 by 12.3 by 8 inches and weighs about the same. Snapping the Toughbook G2 into its keyboard dock increases system size to 2.1 by 11.3 by 9.3 inches and weight to 4.9 pounds.
The Panasonic’s IP65 ingress protection means it’s impervious to dirt, dust, and pressurized water jets, though not immersion in water. A sliding privacy shutter covers the 1080p webcam above the screen. There’s also an 8-megapixel camera on the back for snapping shots at job sites. The webcam supports face recognition, but when I tried using Settings > Accounts > Sign-in Options to register my face with Windows Hello, the system activated the rear camera instead.
Below the display you’ll find the power button, volume up and down buttons, a Windows key, and a screen rotation button. Two buttons below the screen and one to the right are programmable for functions such as launching a utilities menu, turning off the display, or taking a picture. Behind a latched door on the right edge are USB 3.1 Type-A and Type-C ports and an Ethernet port; the AC adapter connector is behind a sliding door at lower left. A tethered stylus snaps into a holder at right.
The keyboard has its own power connector and USB-A and USB-C ports, as well as an undocking latch and a pull-out carrying handle that serves as a kickstand to keep the heavy tablet from toppling backward when used as a laptop. There’s no HDMI port, but you’re not likely to be using the system at a desk with an external monitor or giving presentations from it. Wi-Fi 6 and Bluetooth are standard; 4G LTE mobile broadband with GPS, compatible with the FirstNet first responders’ network, is optional.
Can’t Make a Dent in It
I didn’t torture the Panasonic to the limits of its endurance, but I dropped it from three to four feet onto a carpeted floor, both as a tablet alone and with the tablet docked with the keyboard. Several times, no less. No harm done.
I also put it in the kitchen sink and doused it with the sprayer. Except for Windows’ touch keyboard and a magnifying utility popping up when water hit the screen, nothing happened.
The tablet’s touch screen is more than bright enough to be seen in outdoor sunlight. It’s rated at 1,000 nits, and it provides good contrast and rich, well-saturated colors. On the minus side, 10.1 inches is puny—even the smallest Chromebook screens usually measure at least 11.6 inches diagonally—and the Toughbook G2’s panel put me in the unprecedented position of wishing a display had lower resolution. At 1,920 by 1,200 pixels, the extra-sharp screen makes text too tiny to read even at Windows’ default 150% scaling. Depending on the app, I found myself opting for 175% or even 200% to make things legible.
At least the touch screen worked flawlessly, because I also found myself relying on it rather than the two-button touchpad on the keyboard dock. The pad is not only too small, but—like others I’ve tried designed for use with gloved hands—annoyingly skipped or ignored swipes when used with a bare finger.
The keyboard fares better, though it puts the Delete key on the bottom row instead of its proper place at top right. You must pair the small cursor arrow keys with the Fn key in the absence of dedicated Home, End, Page Up, and Page Down keys, but the typing feel is tolerable—a bit stiff, but snappy—and the keys are comfortably sized and spaced. Even the brightest of the four key-backlight settings isn’t very sunny, however.
The cameras capture fairly well-lit and colorful images with minimal noise. Sound from the bottom-mounted speaker is loud but harsh and hollow, with tinny overtones and no hint of bass or overlapping tracks. The Windows 10 Pro operating system is free of bloatware, with a handy settings utility that lets you optimize the touch screen for pen or glove use or wet conditions.
Testing the Toughbook G2: A Tank, Not a Race Car
At this writing, the only other rugged PC to complete our brand-new benchmark suite is the G2’s 14-inch laptop stablemate, the Panasonic Toughbook 55 Mk2. So I rounded out our performance comparisons with two larger, non-rugged detachables, the Lenovo ThinkPad X12 Detachable and the 15-inch Microsoft Surface Book 3. That left one slot, which I filled with a standard-issue Core i5 convertible, the Lenovo IdeaPad Flex 5i 14.
Productivity Tests
The main benchmark of UL’s PCMark 10 simulates a variety of real-world productivity and content-creation workflows to measure overall performance for office-centric tasks such as word processing, spreadsheeting, web browsing, and videoconferencing. We also run PCMark 10’s Full System Drive test to assess the load time and throughput of a laptop’s storage. (See more about how we test laptops.)
Three benchmarks focus on the CPU, using all available cores and threads, to rate a PC’s suitability for processor-intensive workloads. Maxon’s Cinebench R23 uses that company’s Cinema 4D engine to render a complex scene, while Primate Labs’ Geekbench 5.4 Pro simulates popular apps ranging from PDF rendering and speech recognition to machine learning. Finally, we use the open-source video transcoder HandBrake 1.4 to convert a 12-minute video clip from 4K to 1080p resolution (lower times are better).
Our final productivity test is Puget Systems’ PugetBench for Photoshop, which uses the Creative Cloud version 22 of Adobe’s famous image editor to rate a PC’s performance for content creation and multimedia applications. It’s an automated extension that executes a variety of general and GPU-accelerated Photoshop tasks ranging from opening, rotating, resizing, and saving an image to applying masks, gradient fills, and filters.
The Toughbook G2 fell just short of the 4,000 points in PCMark 10 that indicate excellent productivity, but you’re not going to be crunching large spreadsheets or performing workstation-style video editing or 3D rendering on a 10.1-inch rugged tablet. Its 10th Generation Core i5 processor trails its 11th Gen peers, let alone Core i7 chips, but is more than powerful enough for the tasks it’s destined to do.
Graphics Tests
We test Windows PCs’ graphics with two DirectX 12 gaming simulations from UL’s 3DMark, Night Raid (more modest, suitable for laptops with integrated graphics) and Time Spy (more demanding, suitable for gaming rigs with discrete GPUs).
We also run two tests from the cross-platform GPU benchmark GFXBench 5, which stresses both low-level routines like texturing and high-level, game-like image rendering. The 1440p Aztec Ruins and 1080p Car Chase tests, rendered offscreen to accommodate different display resolutions, exercise graphics and compute shaders using the OpenGL programming interface and hardware tessellation respectively. The more frames per second (fps), the better.
While it’s slow by today’s gaming laptop standards, the Surface Book 3’s Nvidia GeForce GPU destroyed the modest integrated graphics of the other systems, and Intel’s 11th Gen Iris Xe graphics easily beat the older Intel UHD Graphics of the Toughbook G2. Gaming is out of the question for this detachable, except possibly for a few hands of Solitaire between field missions.
Battery and Display Tests
We test laptops’ battery life by playing a locally stored 720p video file (the open-source Blender movie Tears of SteelTears of Steel) with display brightness at 50%. We make sure the battery is fully charged before the test, with Wi-Fi and keyboard backlighting turned off.
We also use a Datacolor SpyderX Elite monitor calibration sensor and its Windows software to measure a laptop screen’s color saturation—what percentage of the sRGB, Adobe RGB, and DCI-P3 color gamuts or palettes the display can show—and its 50% and peak brightness in nits (candelas per square meter).
The G2 had a slight but unfair advantage in our battery test because, with no headphone jack to disable the onboard speaker, we muted the sound instead of blasting it at our usual 100% volume. But even if real-world users aren’t likely to see the 21 and a half hours of runtime we did, they can trust the tablet to keep working till they’re safely back at the station or barracks. The touch screen’s brightness is stellar, even if its color fidelity falls short of graphic design or prepress standards.
Verdict: Are You Tough Enough? Why, Yes
The Panasonic Toughbook G2 is obviously an expensive and specialized entry among Windows tablets or 2-in-1s, built to go where Surface Pros and iPads fear to tread. Its petite size makes it harder to read at a glance than the larger Toughbook 33, though it’s half a pound lighter (as a tablet; 1.2 pounds lighter with keyboards attached) and has more innovative modular options. Like the 33, it’s an awesome rugged solution that won’t let you down when things get rough. Pick whichever you prefer, and be careful out there.
