Panasonic has seemingly lost interest for the mainstream smartphone market. Instead, at Mobile World Congress they’ve unveiled a pair of rugged devices made for special use cases.
The new Toughpad FZ-E1 and Toughpad FZ-X1 look similar, but there’s one important difference between the two. While the former (FZ-E1) runs Windows Embedded 8 Handheld platform, the latter (FZ-X1) relies on Android 4.2 Jelly Bean. Moreover, there are also some differences under the hood: the Toughpad FZ-E1 rocks a 2.3GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon 800 (MSM8974AB) quad-core processor, whereas the Toughpad FZ-X1 gets its power from a slower 1.7GHz S4 Pro (APQ8064T) chip. Rest of the specs are the same and include the following:
- 5-inch 720p HD (1280×720 pixels) touchscreen with 500 cd/m2 brightness (to avoid sunlight reflection)
- 8MP rear camera with flash, 1.3MP front-facing camera
- 2GB of RAM, 32GB of internal memory
- 4G LTE / 3G (HSPA+ 21 Mbps), WiFi 802.11 a/b/g/n/ac, Bluetooth 4.0, GPS, micro HDMI
- Water and dust proof, IP65/IP58 certified body
- Dedicated Security core – FIPS 140-2 Level 2 compliant
- Drop resistant from a height of 3 meters, MIL-STD 810G compliant
- 6,200mAh hot-swappable with up to 14 hours talk time and up to 1000 hours standby
The Panasonic Toughpad FZ-E1 will go on sale in mid-June, with FZ-X1 following by the end of August. As far as we’ve understood, the company is primarily targeting Japanese market with these two. No word on pricing yet…