That mystery tablet PC that appeared at the end of Intel's presentation at IDF last night is no classmate, or super-powered Speak&Spell either: It's a Panasonic Toughbook-alike tablet. More specifically it's a "Mobile Clinical Assistant" device, aimed at doctors and nurses who are under an increasing burden of digital data and imagery nowadays, though there's not much more info available than that fact yet. Shucks... and there we were hoping for something a little more Classmate-y. [Ubergizmo]

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Deep in the northwest corner of Kobe, Japan, there's a factory hidden away among green rice paddies, and sleepy farming villages of tiled roofs. If you were to travel here, to Takatsukadai--the middle of nowhere--you'd find Panasonic's Toughbook plant quietly making notebooks with the world's lowest failure rate. Well, not so quietly, actually. They employ a regimen of over 500 different tests, smashing, dropping and soaking Toughbooks, with over a thousand sacrifices each year. This is where I learned how the old computer plant manages to pull it off, miraculously, almost all under one roof.

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The Toughbook UMPC spotted around CeBIT has been made official by Panasonic. The ultra mobile sports an Atom CPU and runs Vista on its 5.6-inch LCD screen. It is impact resistant like other Toughbooks, and we hope it's just as spill-proof as their notebooks. One thing we can't wrap our heads around the number pad. It's smack-dab in the middle of the letters. Anyone care to help us out with that? [Impress]

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Panasonic's set to release an updated 7-series version of their Toughbook laptops that can drop 76 centimeters, or 2.49 feet, while on and still function correctly. Although 2.5 feet isn't all that tall, it's about the height of the average desk, which means you can safely launch the so far Japan-only Intel Santa Rosa-based laptops onto the ground and still be able to work some spreadsheet magic afterwards. No US pricing or availability yet. [PCWorld]