Panasonic is mostly know for their Audio/Video equipment, but they carry a full range of PC's in Japan. The offering consists of 4 models: the R, T, W and Y. The Panasonic PC's are the only Japanese computers that are completely designed and assembled in Japan. As opposed to the competition, they're not assembled in China and designed in Taiwan, but all the work is done in Japanese, and this is something they're pretty proud of at Panasonic.
We'll talk about the Panasonic R3 today, the ultraportable model of the family. At the moment of writing this article, the R3 is being replaced by the R4, that is completely identical except for the SONOMA processor (the new generation Centrino CPU) and the DDR2 memory on the R4. Because of it's i855 chipset and the age of its design, the R3 could not be named SONOMA anymore.
Specifications
This is a table that sums up the characteristics of the R series (be it the R3 or R4). Once again, the only differences are the graphics chipset (i915GMS for the R4 and i855 for the R3) and the DDR2 support for the R4 (and not on the R3).
One of the elements that you notice immediately on this PC with a 10.4" screen is the weight. It's as light as a feather (990g to be more precise).
It becomes even more impressive when the battery is taken out, because in that case, the weight drops below the magical 700g barrier. As a reminder, Sony's X505CP Carbon weighed in at 780g with and 640g without the battery. If only Panasonic would have invested some time into making the battery lighter, Sony would have had a run for their money and the reference in the category would have been under serious threat. Reducing the weight of the battery also means reducing the battery life though...
When it comes to dimensions, we compared this laptop to the H10 MP3 player by iRIVER and a Sony.
Now let's compare the R3 to a PDA, the
Zaurus SL-C3000.
A machine to work on
If we have an in-depth look at what the portable PC manufacturers are offering nowadays, we see that more and more PC's are designed for a mixed usage, both professional and for leisure purposes, with a heavy emphasis on the last part. The R3 is designed for work ONLY, and we can even say that the complete PC range by Panasonic is aimed more at a professional usage than at a leisure usage. It seems that Panasonic is trying to be the Japanese IBM.
No frills, just the solid basics. Even if the casing is not the sexiest on the market and even a bit too plastic-like... The R3 is robust, clean and well-designed. The weight of the R3 is mainly due to the casing.
When you open up the R3 for the first time, you'll immediately notice 2 things:
The round mouse, and if you turn your circle around the mouse, you'll notice that it serves as a scroll function in navigational windows (Windows Explorer, Internet Explorer, ...).
- The screen, which is not Wide or XBlack, but just a regular screen, made more for wordprocessing than for DVD viewing.
No frills here, that's the key thought! Yes, the R3 is a spartan machine, but it still comes with a/b/g Wireless LAN and a Secure Digital slot. To keep the weight down, the laptop does not come with an internal CD/DVD drive, so you'll have to resort to an external solution if you want to read/write discs. Once again, this machine is meant for the professional market and once configured, this drive quickly becomes an infrequentyl used weight addition. A DVD or Cd player is heavy, expensive, space and energy consuming, so on this type of machine, it's better left out.
The SD slot, although very practical, is not placed in a convenient location and it's very difficult to access as a result. It would have been better to put it at the front beneath the PCMCIA slot.
Power
We were very surprised about the performance and overall speed of the machine. Today's ultimate PC for The Akihabara News is the Fujitsu T series that got a score of 2120 points on PC Mark 2004. Our Panasonic R3 did only marginally worse with a score of 2100, so we can say that these 2 PC's with very similar specifications (CPU and memory-wise) have roughly the same performances. The R4 might do a bit better though with its 512Mb of DDR2 RAM.
Thanks to GeekStuff4U.com for provising us with this test-unit.
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