Gearfuse

If Terminators and Skynet take over Earth, at least you’ll have a laptop that will stand up to them. The Dell E6400 XFR is the latest “toughbook” to hit the market and boy is it ugly. That’s OK, though, because you’re buying this for usability, not design and portability. Inside this ugly beast, you’ll find a decent set of specs including an Intel Core 2 Duo CPU, 256MB of nVidia Quadro 160M graphics and a big 14.1″ display. Not bad, not bad, but where are features like fingerprint recognition and a webcam for video conferencing?

Need one to throw in the bed of your Ford F-150? The XFR won’t come cheap. It starts at $4300 and weighs a whopping 8.5 pounds to boot.

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Panasonic has updated their Toughbook line of notebooks this morning, and this sounds more fun than having an EVDO chip built into non-tough-looking Toughbooks (which a lot of people were talking about last week). Apart from the usual speedbump (which we are not as interested: Intel Core2 Duo ULV L2400), they said that this hardcore Toughbook will work in temperatures as low as -2F (-20C). This is done by a re-design of the screen, which not only doubles the brightness and visibility under direct sunlight (yes please), but there is actually a heater -read- inside the screen. This is the perfect notebook if you happen to get on a cruise in a New York winter, and you will be glad that it’ll be working even if you drop it in snow… Jump for more pics. 

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