Panasonic Toughbook A3
Panasonic’s most rugged Android tablet yet doesn’t disappoint.
Field workers often find themselves in harsh environments where a standard consumer grade tablet just wouldn’t be able to withstand the cold, heat, rain or other conditions they encounter, which is why they turn to rugged tablets such as Panasonic’s new Toughbook A3. The company’s latest rugged tablet is the successor to its Toughbook A2 that launched back in 2016 and a number of upgrades have been made to the device that make it an even better fit for those in working in industries such as the military, construction, government, law enforcement, healthcare and enterprise.
Although the device weighs 0.9kg it doesn’t feel overly heavy. The tablet is a little bit more than half an inch thick at 1.65cm and the device feels very sturdy with no bending or give whatsoever. The 10.1-inch screen takes up most of the front of the device and is protected by a metallic bezel that wraps all the way around which also houses a 5MP front-facing camera, microphone and ambient light sensor. A hard plastic shell protects the edges of the Toughbook A3 from drops and here you’ll find a total of eight physical buttons with five of these being completely user customisable along with a volume up, volume down and power button.
If you flip the Toughbook A3 over, you’ll find two hot swappable 3,200mAh batteries that are locked in place with two slidable tabs. Underneath each battery there is a nano SIM slot and the tablet can be outfitted with two SIM cards.
As a fully rugged device, the Toughbook A3 has an IP65 rating which means the device is water and dust resistant but not waterproof. It is also certified to the latest MIL-STD-810G standard and can withstand six-foot drops. Panasonic has even tumble tested the A3 by putting it through 500 tumbles from 3.3ft at a rate of five rpm.
The Toughbook A3 is powered by Qulacomm’s SDM660 octa-core CPU clocked at 2.2GHz and by 4GB of LPDDR4 RAM. There is 64GB of eMMC storage built into the device but this can be boosted by up to 64 GB with a microSD card. Battery life is one of the A3’s biggest strengths and the tablet lasts for up to nine hours with the two standard 3,200mAh batteries. However, Panasonic also offers dual extended life 5,580mAh batteries that allow the device to run for up to 15.5 hours on a single charge.
The Toughbook A3 ships with Android 9.0 and Panasonic’s bundled apps which include a note taking app, a file copy utility, a whitelisting/blacklisting app, a hardware diagnostic app, a rapid configuration app for enterprise deployment and a barcode reader app.
The Toughbook A3 may only have 4GB of RAM and be powered by a Qualcomm chip from 2017 but during our time with the device it performed quite well and was able to boot up from a powered off state in just over twenty seconds. Apps opened quickly and there were never any crashes or hang ups during our testing. The A3 also received several security updates while in our possession.
The Panasonic Toughbook A3 is well-suited for tough jobs in less than ideal conditions thanks to its IP65 and MIL-STD-810G certifications, and can easily be customised to meet the needs of both field workers and first responders.