Los Angeles (CA) - Can your laptop take a beating and keep on ticking? Panasonic believes their line of rugged 'Toughbook' notebooks can take almost any type of abuse and company representatives happily demonstrated this fact on video. Watch as a Toughbook CF-18 is dropped multiple times, shaken and soaked in water.

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Panasonic calls their Toughbook 18 a "fully rugged" notebook that can be converted into a tablet computer. It uses an low-voltage Intel Pentium M processor and has a 10.4" outdoor-viewable LCD panel. Multiple wireless connectivity options are available, including 802.11 a/b/g, Bluetooth and wireless WAN.

At the MobileFocus event at the CTIA wireless convention in downtown Los Angeles, Panasonic reps showed off the ruggedness of the Toughbook by dropping it several times from about waist height and dousing the keyboard and screen with water. The laptops were also vigorously shaken and some people even stood on the laptops.

The magnesium chassis is one reason why the Toughbook is so durable. Company reps told us that magnesium is much stronger than plastics used in regular notebooks and that the notebook fully meets military ruggedness specifications. You would think all this protection would weigh the notebook down, but the Toughbook 18 is only 4.5 lbs.

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