One of the great things working at Gizmodo has allowed me to do is to get my hands on a whole range of gadgetry that I probably wouldn’t have been able to play around with otherwise. Since I work from home, each ring of the doorbell means there’s probably something new coming, so it’s a little like Christmas, except when I return the gifts nobody gets pissy. But despite the joy of opening up all the gadgets and trying them out, most of them — especially the laptops — end up being disappointing, and I’m rarely too upset to send them back to the vendor and manufacturer.
Not so with the Panasonic R3, a machine so well put-together that I actually considered buying one for my own personal use, and if it didn’t cost twice that of my budget (importers are selling it for around $2800 for a fully-spec’d out unit), I probably would have. What makes the R3 the hands-down best sub-notebook I’ve ever used? Well, for starters, it actually usable.
It’s funny, I’m looking here at the R3 as I write this on my desktop machine, and it doesn’t look that tiny, but as you can see from the picture — that’s a 12-inch Powerbook, not a 15- — it’s quite a bit smaller than most other laptops. I actually got the Sharp Muramasa in for review at the same time, which is even smaller, if you can believe it, but for various reasons (that I’ll get into in a minute) I think it’s safe to say the R3 is about as small as a laptop can conceivably go while retaining the least bit of actual usability. Its keyboard is tiny (and Japanese, with all the character weirdness that entails), but you can definitely get work done on it. Chatting in IRC and IM, for instance, didn’t feel like a chore (as it does on some other, smaller laptops like the Muramasa, which mistakes rubbery chicklets for a proper keyboard).
And the screen is decent, too, and bright; I think you can see in the picture how it compares to the Powerbook’s, which isn’t altogether awful. A 1,024 by 768 resolution seems more than ample, and the 1.1GHz Pentium M processor seemed fast enough to do any sort of non-gaming, non-Photoshop computing I threw at it (which was mostly web browsing and the like, but I still probably had 6 to 10 applications open at any given time with adequate performance). And the little iPod-like circular touchpad at the base was mostly useful, too, although it would try to switch into the “scroll ring” if you got to close to the edge (in lieu of a mouse wheel, you can run your fingers around the outside of the pad like a wet finger on crystal to scroll up or down. It’s nice when it’s not annoying; it mostly works.)
So it’s small, usable, and fast — like almost every other laptop out there. What makes the R3 so special? The defining factor is the weight. It’s almost unnoticeably light even with the battery (which has killer life, I might add. Something along the lines of four to five hours including multiple start ups and shuts downs. I used it all weekend once without recharging.) I put the R3 in a little manpurse I carry around, you know, just to have, and was able to walk around all afternoon in Manhattan without it giving me the least amount of concern. You just don’t get that from most laptops — even tiny Powerbooks, sadly.
Maybe I’m not doing a very good job emphasizing it. This is the very first laptop I’ve ever used that was both practical to use and light enough to carry around everywhere without it being a burden. Being able to always have your laptop without breaking your back is amazing.
And it doesn’t hurt that it’s really nice looking, too, despite a sort of goofy top plastic piece (which can be exchanged for different color shells, if you want).
So yeah, I’m sad to send this one back. I know I may not be doing the best job explaining why this one was so great to have around, but suffice it to say that everyone who played with it fell in love with it, even the Geniuses at the SoHo Apple store. If you’ve got three large to drop on a laptop, it’s always nice to know you can purchase one of the very few laptops out there that make even jaded Apple snobs jealous.
You can get the R3 from a variety of retailers, including Kemplar, who provided this unit for me to review.
Read – Product Page [Kemplar]
