September 2017

Many rugged laptops have attached handles, and carry handles are available for some rugged tablets as accessories. But there are some rugged tablets that have a handle built right into their design. That goes back well over a decade when Intel researchers, ever interested in exploring new markets for their chips, came up with what they called the "Mobile Clinical Assistant" reference platform, or simply MCA. in 2007, Motion Computing was the first to convert the concept into a product, the Motion C5. Others followed, and Motion, now part of Xplore, continues the C5/F5 tablets with integrated handles to this day. The whole story is explained in Bob Ashenbrenner's article True Story: How Field Service First Got a Handle on Mobility (Thanks to Hospitals) on Xplore Technologies' blog. [Read True Story: How Field Service First Got a Handle on Mobility (Thanks to Hospitals)]

Getac's next gen F110 fully rugged tablet provides maximum performance and multi-layer security in 'right size' form factor
Getac is introducing its 4th generation F110 fully rugged tablet, one of the company's best-selling mobile devices. Designed to help field service professionals meet the demands of extreme working environments, the F110 combines Intel® Kaby Lake processors and new multi-layer security features with a fully rugged design to create the best performing and most secure fully rugged tablet in the market. [See Getac press release and RuggedPCReview's description, analysis and specs of the Getac F110] -- Posted Tuesday, September 26, 2017

Zebra Technologies unveils Savanna platform to power data-driven applications for the digital enterprise
Zebra Technologies Corporation (NASDAQ: ZBRA), the market leader in rugged mobile computers, barcode scanners and barcode printers enhanced with software and services to enable real-time visibility, today announced Savanna, a fundamental building-block platform for accelerating Enterprise Asset Intelligence and the digital transformation of enterprise operations for Zebra's customers and partners. [See Zebra press release] -- Posted Tuesday, September 26, 2017

The impact of iPhones on the rugged handheld market
Apple has been selling well over 200 million iPhones annually for the past several years. This affects the rugged handheld market both directly and indirectly. On the positive side, the iPhone brought universal acceptance of smartphones. That accelerated acceptance of handheld computing platforms in numerous industries and opened new applications and markets to makers of rugged handhelds. On the not so positive side, many of those sales opportunities didn't go to providers of rugged handhelds. Instead, they were filled by standard iPhones. There are many examples where aging rugged handhelds were replaced by iPhones, sometimes by the tens of thousands. That happened despite the relatively high cost of iPhones and despite their inherent fragility. [read The impact of iPhones on the rugged handheld market] -- Posted Wednesday, September 13, 2017

Intel's 8th-gen U Series Core processors
On August 21, Intel announced what the company calls their 8th Generation Intel Core processors. For now that's just four chips, the i5-8250U and i5-8350U, and the i7-8550U and i7-8650U (see here). From what we can tell, these remain 15-watt 14nm chips with the same 7th gen Kaby Lake architecture, which already was only a minor advance over 6th gen Skylake. What has changed, though, is that these four chips are all quad-core/eight thread systems, so whatever software takes advantage of that will be significantly faster. But what about battery life with all these extra cores? Intel says it's "uncompromised," and that's likely because the new chips run at a much lower base frequency (albeit higher turbo boost) than the equivalent Kaby Lake processors. So what we'll likely see will be the availability of 8th gen chips as high end options. But, for now, 8th gen doesn't look "must have." -- Posted Tuesday, September 5, 2017