there's no denying that the trend in mobile devices is towards making them
thinner and lighter even if it means sacrificing features that we used to
take for granted like user-swappable batteries extensive i o options or even
something as basic as a headphone jack well as for panasonic their fz 55 takes
that trend and friend chokes lands it i
mean almost literally look at look at this freaking thing so panasonic
sponsored this video and sent over not
just the toughbook 55 but also this box
of upgrade modules fingerprint reader rfid reader blu-ray drive
is that a graphics card and all of these
can be user upgraded if you have the
inclination and the crazy part
it's not even that thick
oh my god it has a sim slot i love this thing
now first and foremost the toughbook 55 is of course a laptop so it comes
equipped with Intel's eighth generation codename whiskey lake processors up to
64 gigs of RAM check this out
as a touch screen model with stylus support and then it has some other stuff
that most people might not really think of so one
is backwards compatibility with both panasonic's previous generation desk
docks and car docks you know just in
case you need to dock your laptop in the car it's got a quad array microphone and
get this they claim 92 decibel peak
loudness speakers so i gotta hear these
so it's all right the idea behind that is
that it can both hear you and be heard even under challenging conditions like
and get this this is right from their literature a police cruiser going down
the highway with the Windows down and the sirens on very specific
so each of these like little modular
pieces right here can be removed from the laptop and then have additional
components swapped into them and here's a really crazy one there's a quick
release latch for the storage because you never know when you're gonna
need to rip the SSD out of your drive
put it in a paper shredder and like freaking hard bail right
like what i don't know how much i'm like supposed
to pick and prod at this thing um but i'm i'm like super curious what's
under here too it's funny there's always like really cool technology in the
consumer space and then there's really cool technology in the enterprise space
and the kinds of solutions that they build are just things that you would have never considered that anybody
needed and actually on that note it can be configured with raid 1 so that
you have real time data mirroring with the optional SSD upgrade so it's just a
standard m.2 drive and it's just got a little carrier pcb that adapts it to
this hot pluggable interface here i actually don't know
that it is strictly speaking hot plugable in fact it it probably isn't
um hopefully this thing boots back up
mercifully i was at least in sleep when i unplugged that so i'm gonna put it
back in and see if this thing fires back up immediately
okay we're in the BIOS i guess that's the perfect opportunity
to bring up that this thing has a ton of security features including trusted
platform module 2.0 v pro nist BIOS protection 256-bit aes wi-fi
encryption optional opal encrypted drives and a variety of options for 2fa
oh there we go okay rebooting got the SSD to pick back up again that was
pretty dumb so that brings us perfectly into our first upgrade ability adventure
so right over here on this side is a smart card reader and if you don't work
in the enterprise space you might probably think that it's sort
of pointless to have like you know smart card readers in your laptop
but actually a lot of enterprises use these as a second factor for things like
accessing confidential information like say a client's medical records that's
not the only option though so let's go ahead and have a look at what else we've
got here this is a fingerprint reader module
okay pretty straightforward
so from the bottom here
wait
nope
there we go we go ahead and
pop that out
pop that in and there we go
now we have a fingerprint sensor picked up just like that
so let's go ahead and try it boom logged in i like this thing but let's
say our organization doesn't like fingerprint readers for second factors
now we've got oh an rfid reader
so there it is right there
flip this puppy over and now we have an rfid reader there
then if you're not into rfid there's also the Windows hello infrared facial
scanner so basically the idea here is that even though this is clearly not the
most space efficient way to add something as simple
as an rfid scanner to a laptop you're not stuck with any biometric
security options that you don't want and
you have only the ones that you do need now not everybody needs that stuff and
that's where the modularity comes into play so this second bay here is actually
identical there we go to the battery bay
that's on the other side so this 6300 milliamp hour battery nets the toughbook
55 20 hours in mobilemark's office
productivity suite but this is where things get really cool you
can actually chuck a second one into the other side
now i will say this does increase the weight
of the unit fairly substantially for a whopping
40 hours and if for whatever reason your
application doesn't allow you to power down at all you can even
hot swap the batteries if you have spare ones on the side so you just never have
to power the thing down don't remove both of them though that would that
would cause it to turn off but as you guys can see we have only just scratched
the surface of all of our upgrade modules here so why don't we go ahead
and see what we can put in this slot
so once again panasonic has adapted the standard interface on this thing which
is presumably SATA to their own interface that
i don't know what that would be it must be pci express in some form or
another at any rate that just pops in like that
wow this is like really easy it's almost too
easy uh one thing that they did mention
is that if you're like an administrator and you don't want your users just like
accidentally popping their ssds out um there are locking screws that you can
put in so that's the locking screw for the SSD
if i recall correctly and i think this one is the locking screw so people don't
accidentally like rip their optical drive out of the laptop so this is a
blu-ray drive this is basically the same as the dvd drive except
uh more blue so i don't really need to show you guys that i think what you guys
want to see is the graphics card you want to see the graphics card
i want to see the graphics card so this is the GPU pack and this is why i said
that panasonic's modular interface here
must be some sort of pci express because otherwise how on
earth would you put what appears to be a gt551
gt550 i guess i don't know we're going to find out what kind of graphics card
it is in just a moment but the module looks pretty similar to our optical
drive except of course there's a cooling fan that happens to correspond
with the ventilation holes on the bottom of the laptop
just like that it's a Radeon pro
wx4150 i've never even heard of that graphics card but we're gonna fire up
some rocket league on it nonetheless anyway this update was downloading
really slow so uh i thought hey wouldn't it be great if we had an Ethernet jack
now's a good time to have a look at the i o of this thing so we've got a usb 3 type a usb 3 type c
there it is we've got an Ethernet jack over here
we've got micro sdxc headphone microphone combo jack of course these
have splash resistant covers just in case you you know get water on your
laptop it is ip53 rated although panasonic was very clear to me that i
was not to leave it out in the rain
i'm very clear about that and the modularity continues doesn't it
my friends there is of course the io pack if you'd like to add some
additional i o to your laptop uh unfortunately this pack looks oh wait
where does this pack go oh no way
it goes at the back okay so at the back we've got another
usb 3 type a HDMI 2.0
and then this that brings our total number of
bays up to 1 two
three four five six
seven wait a minute even this back usb 3 has screws in it
what even is that this is like an access hatch to the CPU cooling heatsink
there it is another freaking upload slot so what do
we have here vga and serial just in case you need
that or like not if you don't
and then whatever the hell that is
okay it's kind of a clever approach the whole dual battery pack because it gives you
that hot swap ability and it means you can take the thing on a plane even
though it has more capacity than you would be allowed to bring on if it was a
single battery okay i'm still waiting for my game to
download and i'm just curious like everything on this thing goes together
with screws which is so weird in this day and age when
everything is done with like clips and stuff so i was just
wondering what this is so that's the antenna
that's the main antenna it just has oh that makes sense as a plastic cover
because otherwise how would it work but you want as much of this thing as
possible to be made out of this uh magnesium alloy that actually it
contributes to it being quite a lot lighter than you'd expect
i mean it's got two batteries in it now so it's a little on the heavy side now but with just one in it's
it's deceivingly light now i remember having that same experience the first
time i saw a tough book actually back in the early 2000s it blew me away because
it was like this tiny i forget it was like an 11 or a 12 inch model which was
really small at the time and i was like whoa this thing weighs
like nothing this is so cool how much is it and the sales guy at london drugs is
like oh it's like 3 500 i was like oh cool
i'm a high school student yeah
oh actually now's a good time to look at the privacy mode for the keyboard you
know you don't need to rip your SSD out but you don't want anybody looking at your screen
it's actually still on but the brightness is so low that no one
could conceivably actually see what's on it and then they've also got a night
color shift thing that you can set up to either manually enable or you can set a
timer or you can use the light sensor or whatever the case may be and you can
apply different screen effects like you know a reading mode or can configure
your night mode maybe you prefer this for your night mode most people probably
won't use that green night mode oh oh actually oh right i could see
never mind i could see someone using like the green or the red one depending
on what environment they're in this is another cool thing so the keyboard
actually feels pretty darn good to me but if you didn't like it or more
realistically if the layout wasn't ideal for what you're doing or you know your
language or you have a specialized application it's also modular
three screws right here and you can pop off the keyboard
all right well i'm not saying that this is gonna be like you know your primary
gaming device anytime soon but 60fps all high quality in rocket league
1080p it's not unusable that's for sure
boom that sucked
no stop so that was the craziest one now i've
just got a couple more things so first is the smart card reader and you guys
might be a little confused because you thought we already saw the smart
card reader this is the smart card reader that goes in the other side
hold on a second we haven't even looked
under this door oh oh it's just like a RAM door okay well
that's that's fairly straightforward and then finally
the SSD pack so this goes where the graphics card
went and inside it is presumably a similar
model of SSD to the one that goes in the more SSD specific
uh door over here now i want to know what's under the security torx of this
one now too oh okay so this is upgradable components
but not necessarily panasonic's you know modular ones so in here we've got our
wi-fi so you could swap that out for like a
wi-fi six ax module if you wanted and then i'm actually not it's hard to
say because this has like a thermal pad on it i'm not 100 sure what this is but
it's also wireless oh
you know what this laptop has cellular
so it's probably something to do with that there's just a couple more things i'm
curious about there was another security torx covering this door so i want to know
what it does what do we got
oh so that's the connector for the display
now panasonic says that the display is not a user upgradable modular thing but
like you can clearly see how it's assembled so my guess is that if you
could get your hands on one you could probably do it even if that's not
something that they support and i also wanted to pop the keyboard off and see
how that works it's not something that i would do for switch quality these are
fine okay so that's glued down
i wonder if panasonic had intended for me to do this
i'm kind of guessing no well they should have known what they were
getting themselves into
oh okay so there you go it's just some adhesive strips and then like a pretty
standard ribbon interface down here so you guys can check out the toughbook 55
at the link in the video description but i want to hear from you guys in the comments
what would your loadout be personally i would go with two battery
packs because i am really careless sometimes and i forget to recharge my
battery and that would be really really nice for me when i'm traveling i would i
think i'd throw in the GPU just because that way i don't have to
carry around any GPU if i just want to play some you know filthy casual games
i'd definitely throw the extra i o pack on there i didn't need any of the other
stuff but having vga would be really nice when that comes up and then i'd
probably throw in another stick of RAM and then stick with the regular standard
SSD and then upgrade my wi-fi to wi-fi six
it's mind-blowing to me that i even have those kinds of options i think this
thing is really cool so like i said again thanks to panasonic for sponsoring
this video and if you guys want to check this thing out it's going to be linked in the video description