As well as their headline smartphone announcements this morning, Verizon have also officially confirmed a couple of featurephones that have each been rattling around the rumor mill for a while. The LG Chocolate Touch and Samsung Convoy – a touchscreen candybar and rugged flip, respectively – don’t have the Android magic or hardware QWERTY of the Verizon DROID Eris by HTC or the BlackBerry Curve 8530.
While we often can be found heaping scorn onto the me-too Atom N270 netbook ranges that pass our viewing window, Intel’s low-power chip does occasionally find its way into an interesting machine. Stealth Computer have slotted the 1.6GHz chip into their latest “Little PC”, the Stealth LPC-395F, a fanless nettop with a ruggedized chassis and front-loading 2.5-inch hard-drive bay.
Ruggedized PC manufacturer Getac have announced a multitouch upgrade to their suitably-sturdy V100 Tablet PC; however, while they may not be the first to throw multi-finger control into the mixture, their Windows 7 compatible display uses resistive rather than capacitive technology. While capacitive touchscreens – such as found on the iPhone – are fashionable right now, resistive touchscreens have the benefit of working with gloved fingers.
A-DATA have lobbed a few new external hard-drives our way and, while we’d normally squeal like little girls at the thought of data damage, today we’re mute as sensible, grown men. That’s because the A-DATA SH93 portable hard-drives are waterproof and shock resistant, thanks to a nifty molded rubber-plastic casing.
We’ve seen cellularly-enabled CCTV cameras before – capable of shooting images across the mobile networks and directly to your cellphone – but never have they been so droid-like in their design. BrickHouse Security’s motion-activated Global Watchman is a ruggedized 1.3-megapixel camera with onboard battery and IR flash for discretely illuminating nighttime scenes.
Video demo after the cut
It has been a long time since I wrote about a new PDA; it feels like a throwback to 2002. A company called Handheld has unveiled its latest ultra-rugged PDA packed with features for workers on the go. The PDA promises to be the most robust on the market.
There are quite a few companies out there who will sell you a ruggedized laptop, cellphone or digital camera, but they’ll also help themselves to a healthy amount from your wallet in return. The gang at Popular Mechanics decided to see if – with only the sort of typical supplies you could find at Home Depot and Staples – they could make their own versions for a whole lot less money. That, of course, provided the ideal opportunity to give one of Dell’s Inspiron 1545 notebooks a good kicking.
Stealth Computer have unveiled their latest notebook, the NW-2000, a ruggedized hybrid laptop/tablet based around Intel’s 1.06GHz Core 2 Duo, a 13.3-inch sunlight viewable resistive touchscreen and MIL-STD-810F, shock & vibration compliance. The sturdy convertible has 2GB of RAM (4GB maximum), a 160GB shock-mounted hard-drive (or optional SSD) and spill-resistant keyboard, and can cope with being dropped 91cm onto a wood-covered concrete surface 26 times in succession without impairing functionality.
In case you’ve been holding out for a new model camera that sports a rough around the edges appeal, you might be pleased to hear Olympus revealed today their Stylus TOUGH-6010 series, which offers a tough outer shell and competent features.
We’ve covered numerous backup systems here on SlashGear, ranging from simple USB hard-drives through network-attached media boxes and full-on RAID arrays, but bar individual drive failure we’ve never really considered the impact of physical damage. That’s exactly the sort of thing that ioSafe have in mind with their Solo drive, up to 1.5TB of fireproof, waterproof storage. SlashGear have been testing it out.
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