Panasonic Toughpad FZ-F1 & FZ-N1 with Windows 10 IoT & Android for Work Announced

Panasonic, a well established electronics company headquartered in Japan has released their latest rugged devices and they’re not tablet or either smartphones, but can be said as handled tablets since the screen size is of 4.7-inches. They technically come under the smartphone range with their size, but company is marketing them as rugged toughpads, as they are aptly named Toughpad FZ F1 and N1.

These are the rugged products design for enterprise use in manufacturing, retail, warehouses, emergency services, and in any other professions where it is sure that your smartphone is going to take beating. The important difference between these two models is that FZ-F1 runs on the Windows 10 IoT Mobile Enterprise Edition, whereas the FZ-N1 runs on the Android 5.1.1 Lollipop with pre-loaded Android for Work. Your company’s IT department can have separate and secure work container.

Regarding appearance, they are chunky, heavy and have hardened rubber, bolted metal slates, molded plastic materials used, which makes them weigh around 0.61 lbs (approx. 276g). Sporting all the standard you can expect from an ultra-rugged device including durability and IP67 certification, which makes it waterproof and shockproof. The 4.7-inch display is of 720p resolution and offers 10-point capacitive multi-touch with rain sensing and glove touch mode features. There is also an option to get stylus pen as an accessory in the form of the passive and active digitizer. There is no mention of which glass protection is used on display.

The Toughpads sports a uniquely angled rear barcode reader and offers 4G LTE connectivity, extremely loud speakers and noise cancellation features. As the devices are intended for enterprise use, they offer NFC, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and microSD card slot. You can use two dual micro SIMs and use micro USB port to charge. It has a 3200mAh capacity battery pack which can be swapped with optional 6000mAh battery pack. The device supports quick charging, so you don’t have to wait long to fully charge the device.

Both handheld tablets are powered by Qualcomm’s MSM8974AB chipset, which is a Quad-core processor clocking at 2.3GHz. In terms of camera, the rear camera is of 8MP resolution with LED Flash and front camera is of 5MP resolution. Sporting heavy duty specifications, these devices would be coming with 3 years warranty by company. They will start selling in Europe sometime around June, the FZ-N1 Android version will fetch for Euro 1715 while Windows-powered FZ-F1 will set you back Euro 1746.