Small notebooks are nothing new. They were around long before netbooks or ultrabooks hit the scene. They just carried a much higher price tag than their modern equivalents… and they became a lot harder to find once netbooks started selling for $400 or less, convincing shoppers that small notebooks should be cheaper than their 15.6 inch cousins, not the other way around.But apparently Panasonic never got the memo. Not only has the company never introduced a proper (cheap) netbook, but Panasonic keeps pumping out high-priced mini-laptops with high performance parts-Laptop Keyboard .
The latest example is the Panasonic Let’s Note J10.
This little guy has a 10.1 inch, 1366 x 768 pixel display, an Intel Sandy Bridge processor, a choice of a hard drive or a solid state disk, a compact Laptop Keyboard and 4GB to 8GB of storage.
Oh yeah, and it also gets up to 8 hours of battery life with the standard battery but there’s an extended battery option that provides up to 12.5 hours of run time.
Panasonic offers a compact Laptop Keyboard , COre i3, Core i5, and Core i7 processor options, hard drives ranging from 320GB to 1TB or 128GB or 256GB solid state disks.
The Panasonic Let’s Note J10 is a bit thicker than your typical ultrabook, measuring about 1.4 inches thick. But the little laptop weighs just 2.2 pounds, making it at least as portable as a netbook or ultrabook.
Unfortunately the J10 is only available in Japan, where it sells for between $1500 and nearly $4200 depending on the configuration. There are a handful of retailers including Dynamism and Conics which make a business model out of buying gadgets that are only available in Japan and making them available internationally — but that tends to drive the price up even higher.
To pair nicely alongside that beastly Let’s Note B11 we showed you last week, Panasonic’s now also selling its J10 netbook series in Japan. Aesthetically speaking, the new Let’s Note J10 isn’t much different than its predecessor, the J9, though it has changed a bit (as expected) in the specs department. The entry level 10.1-inch (1366 x 768) J10 gets you Intel’s Core i3-2350M CPU with 320GB of hard drive storage as well as 4GB of RAM, while the higher-end model sports an i7-2640M chip (sorry, no Ivy Bridge here), up to 8GB of memory and you can choose between a 256GB SSD or a 1TB HDD. Additionally, each unit’s packing a hefty amount of ports, including two USB 2.0, one USB three-dot-oh and an HDMI out. Those looking to grab one of these J10s best have deep wallets, as pricing ranges from 120,000 yen (about $1,500) all the way up to around 267,000 yen.
