Panasonic last night finally showed us its  CF-U1 ultra-mobile ToughBook, which was first announced in March, and it looks good. It is designed for field use by the likes of site engineers and municipal officials, and so should not be judged by the same standards as a consumer model.

For instance, I normally hate ultra-mobiles that use small keyboards with mobile-phone style keys. I'd rather have a good attached keyboard or none at all, because you can always plug one in or use a Bluetooth model if necessary, and the Windows handwriting recognition is well good enough for lighter input such as emails.

The CF-U1's 5.6in 1024 x 600 touch screen is too small for comfortable handwriting input but it is not designed for people who want to write War and Peace. Users are likely to hold it in   one hand and control it in the other, probably for specialist form-filling applications.

Unlike many early tablets designed for this purpose, it is small enough to do this easily though it is much chunkier than most UMPCs: a full 5.7cm thick. But its 15.1cm x 18.4cm footprint is par for the format and it weighs just 1.06Kg.

That is heavier than some UMPCs but still light enough to carry with ease - and it includes the weight of two batteries, which Panasonic says give a working life between charges of nine hours, more than  enough for a whole working day. Moreover the batteries are hot-swappable. You can carry a spare pair and replace the ones in the machine without switching it off.

Solid-state drives (max 32GByte) come as standard, and the machine is designed to be dropped from 1.2m without damage. It has a magnesium alloy case like earlier Tough Books, but coated to increased scratch resistance.

The CF-U1 uses an Intel Z520 Atom processor and comes with Vista or what Panasonic describes curiously as an "XP downgrade". Watch out for a full review soon.