It’s handsomely rugged. It’s award-winning gorgeous. It’s stunningly svelte at a shade over two pounds. Oh, and the battery is good for nine hours. Is this the laptop of your dreams? Sorry, you can’t buy one …

One of these rugged laptops is not like the other ones.

The Panasonic Toughbook CF-R3 laptop caught my eye when it landed a silver award in the 2005 Industrial Designers Society of America’s Industrial Design Excellence Awards. Holy cow, this is one mean little rugged notebook.

The Toughbook CF-R3 laptop is targeted to business professionals requiring mobile computing. The design balances two contradictory principles of lightness (it weighs in at just over 2 pounds along with an impressive nine-hour battery life) and toughness (for optimum protection of the hard drive) all in a sleek and engaging form. Its sophisticated styling is full of originality, including the raised, bonnet structure on the exterior top panel and the circular scrolling touch pad, which enables scrolling by tracing around the rim. The waveform palm rest improves the PC’s heat release and reduces the perceived temperature on the palm. In addition, the consumer’s ability to color customize the exterior top panel (with up to 14 color choices) has contributed to a 150 percent increase in Internet sales.

I’m guessing that the increase in sales must have come from outside the US, because I couldn’t find the handsome little devil listed on Panasonic’s Toughbook website (nor on Group Mobile, a leading retailer of rugged laptops). It looks similar to the Centrino-powered Toughbook-T2 (which comes with integrated 802.11b+g, rotateable touchscreen, magnesium case, and a shock-mounted hard drive), but the battery specs are far superior and the weight is lighter.

Inquiring minds want to know … is it just a matter of time until the CF-R3 reaches these shores?