RuggedPCReview Blog
type: channel
description: Whatever's rugged and tough, we talk about it... [Back to Home]
language: en
date: 2024-06-06T16:04:14+00:00
generator agent: http://www.movabletype.org/
items: What's your laptop or tablet's gas mileage?
items: No more AdSense
items: The Thunderbolt disaster
items: Should we add pricing and "Best of"?
items: Was Intel 11th generation "Tiger Lake" the milestone we thought it was?
items: If I were on the board of a rugged device provider...
items: Intel’s 12th generation “Alder Lake” Hybrid processors
items: Thunderbolt 4 and other tech issues
items: On Image-Stabilizing Binoculars
items: The Ingress Protection Rating
items: The Intel Iris Xe Graphics mystery
items: Thunderbolt 4
items: Intel generations
items: DJI Enterprise -- Drones are becoming serious business
items: Consumer Smartphones vs Rugged Handhelds

What's your laptop or tablet's gas mileage?
type: item
description: How long does a charge of the battery in your phone, tablet or laptop last? How long is it supposed to last? If the tech specs do include battery life, can you trust that number? How was it measured? Can you rely on it? How much does battery life matter? Or is it just something that should last long enough? When Steve Jobs introduced the Apple iPad in 2010, he said that such a tablet should run ten hours on a job, and that sort of became what people expect from a tablet. With mobile computers used on the job, the industry more or less agreed that a device should last a full shift, generally eight hours. But, again, how is that measured? Are there any standards? Why isn't there a "Miles-per-Gallon" for mobile computers? Battery life of a device is generally treated like an afterthought in its specifications. It's usually listed as "approximately" so and so long, or "up to" so many hours. A tiny asterisk may refer to additional information in the fine print at the bottom of the specs. That just doesn't seem like enough. Since battery life definitely matters, why can't it be tested and listed more like gas mileage on a car or truck, so you know how many miles per gallon you can expect (or liters per 100 km in other parts of the world)? Those measures, mandated by the government, may not be perfect, but they do provide an idea of how efficient a vehicle is, and how often you have to fill up. If you know how much fuel goes into your tank and how many miles per gallon your vehicle gets, that gives you a pretty good idea how far you can go and whether that's good enough for your driving habits and patterns. That applies to gasoline-powered vehicles. With electric cars, it's a bit more difficult. There you have to go by how many miles the manufacturer or the government says you're going to get from a full charge. You may know what the capacity of your battery is or how much charge you have left, but there isn't a universally accepted measure of efficiency, like the miles pe…
creator: conradb212
date: 2024-06-06T16:04:14+00:00

No more AdSense
type: item
description: Ads.... I get it. With TV, having to watch commercials was the cost of getting free content. Until streaming came and pretty much replaced cable TV and its double-whammy of commercials AND charging more and more for the service. When Netflix started streaming, you got a lot of content without commercials for a very modest monthly fee. Now, there are dozens of major streaming providers and they all want a steadily increasing monthly fee. Print news and print magazines are pretty much dead. And they still haven't figured out how to charge for content. Hiding everything behind paywalls ticks people off. And let's not even get into those hideous "subscriptions" for every app and every site. Who thought trying to trick people into subscribing for every little app was a good idea? Who needs hundreds of unmanageable monthly payments that often are almost impossible to cancel? What a nightmare. But you can't expect content to be free, and so we've come to grudgingly accept that nothing is ever truly free. Banner ads and such initially seemed an acceptable way to go. Unless they take over and become simply too obnoxious. Until there's more click-bait than actual content. And so on. It's a real disaster for all sides. I thought about this long and hard when we launched RuggedPCReview.com almost two decades ago. Even back then, the handwriting was on the wall. Creating content costs time and money, and there had to be a reasonable, optimal way to make it all work out for all involved. The solution we came up with back then was use a technology sponsorship model where companies that felt our content was worthwhile and needed, and with which they wanted to be associated with and seen with because it could generate business and impact purchasing decisions. Technology sponsors would get banner ads on our front page, and also on the pages that dealt with their products. However, since it took time to build a sponsorship base that covered our costs, we also set up Google’s AdSense i…
creator: conradb212
date: 2024-03-15T19:33:24+00:00

The Thunderbolt disaster
type: item
description: Back in September 2023, Intel very quietly introduced Thunderbolt 5. Intel had shown demos of it even in late 2022, but it won't be until sometime in 2024 before we'll actually start seeing Thunderbolt 5. And even then, gamers will likely get it first, because speed and bandwidth is what Thunderbolt excels at, and that's what gamers need. We're talking bi-directional transfer speed of up to 80Gbps, which is VERY fast. Then there's resolution. It's been nearly a decade since 4k TVs passed old 1080p "full HD" models, and it's only a matter of time until 8k is here, at least with TVs. PC monitors are lagging behind a bit, with just Apple and LG using 5k screens and monitors, and laptop screens are farther behind yet. But 8k screens will eventually arrive and they will need high speed connection. Thunderbolt 5 will be ready for that. But other than that, what's the case for Thunderbolt 5? Judging by how Thunderbolt 4 made out, not much. Thunderbolt started as a joint effort between Intel and Apple, combining the PCI Express and DisplayPort signals. Thunderbolt 1 and 2 had special connectors and were primarily used on Apple products. Thunderbolt 3 switched to the reversible USB-C connector, the same as, well, USB uses. But it wasn't until Thunderbolt 4 appeared in 2020 that the world took notice, sort of. And that was mostly because Intel (stealth-)marketed Thunderbolt 4 as a "one wire solution." The sales pitch was that you could just plug a laptop or tablet into a Thunderbolt 4 dock, and, voila, duel external screens, all the peripherals and also all the charging you needed were right there, including that of the laptop or tablet itself. All of that with just one wire between the laptop and the TB4 dock. Some of our readers were very excited about that. Except that, as we soon found out, it didn't always work. At RuggedPCReview.com, we tested a good number of high-end new rugged devices that supported Thunderbolt 4 and found that things are far from as simple as they s…
creator: conradb212
date: 2023-11-13T16:27:54+00:00

Should we add pricing and "Best of"?
type: item
description: It's in the nature of tech sites such as RuggedPCReview.com to periodically review the operation and see if it's perhaps time to expand sections, add new things, update or retire this and that, and so on. It's then also time to review the tools and utilities used to manage the site, or perhaps switch to an entirely different system altogether. As far as the latter goes, every three years or so we've contemplated switching from our "hand-coded" approach that goes back to the very beginning of RuggedPCReview.com almost two decades ago, to a more integrated website management system. That usually means WordPress, which is by far the leader in site creation and management. And each time the answer was a definite "no way." WordPress, of course, is powerful and has massive third-party support. It's a great system for many types of websites, but ours isn't one of them. We'll review that decision again, but I doubt that we'll come to a different conclusion. But there are other things to consider. One of them is if we should add price to the comprehensive spec sheet at the end of every one of our product reviews. That sounds like an obvious thing to do, but it really isn't. Pricing is so very relative. There's MSRP, the manufacturer's suggested retail price. There's "street" price. There are quantity discounts. And price always depends on configurations and options. Manufacturers often list a "starting at" price, and we've occasionally done that as well. But with computers, and especially rugged ones with all of their possible deployments and applications, "nicely equipped" can cost twice as much or more than the "starting at" price. Should we simply inquire with the manufacturer and see what they would like for us to list? Perhaps, and we've done that. Or should we just stay with "inquire"? There's also the fact that, as fairly specialized and usually relatively low-volume products, rugged computing systems are not inexpensive. In an industry that's dealing with customers o…
creator: conradb212
date: 2023-04-27T17:36:09+00:00

Was Intel 11th generation "Tiger Lake" the milestone we thought it was?
type: item
description: In the wonderful world of technology, there are few things where progress is as mind-blowingly fast as in electronics. Today you can get an iPhone with 100,000 times the storage capacity of the hard disk in an early IBM PC. And the clockspeed of the CPU in that early PC was a thousand times slower than that in a modern PC. That incredible pace of technological progress has revolutionized the world and our lives, opened up new opportunity and made things possible that weren't even dreamed of just a few decades ago. But that progress also means greatly accelerated obsolescence of the computing products we're using. That electronic obsolescence would't be so bad if the software on our computers remained more or less static, but that's never the case. Every increase in computing power and storage capacity is quickly soaked up by more complex and more demanding software. Loaded with current software, a state of the art PC of five years ago is slow, and one built ten years ago is barely able to boot. While the rapid advance is good news for many consumers who, even at a cost, love to have the latest and greatest and don't mind getting new gear every year or two, it's bad news for commercial, industrial and government customers that count on significantly longer life cycles. For them, rapid obsolescence either means extra cost to stay up to date, or fall behind, sometimes hopelessly so. I wrote about that predicament some time ago in a post called "Intel generations" -- how the rapid succession of Intel Core processor families has made obsolescence an ongoing, costly problem. And one that isn't going away anytime soon. That's why for manufacturers and consumers alike it's always great when a technology comes along that won't quickly be obsolete or replaced by something different. But that doesn't happen often, and so it's good to at least have milestones -- things that, while not representing the be-all and end-all, at least are here to stay for a while, giving customers a…
creator: conradb212
date: 2022-10-03T20:28:18+00:00

If I were on the board of a rugged device provider...
type: item
description: If I were on the board of a rugged device provider, here's what I would ask them to consider. Folks, I would say, there are truly and literally billions of smartphones out there. Almost everyone uses them every day, including on the job. Many are inexpensive and easily replaced. Almost all are put in a protective sleeve or case. That is monumental competition for makers and vendors of dedicated rugged handhelds. To get a piece of the pie, to make the case that a customer should buy rugged devices instead of cheaper consumer devices, you have to outline why they should. Outline, describe, and prove. You should point at all the advantages of rugged devices. And not just the devices themselves, but also why your expertise, your experience, the extra services you provide, the help you can offer, the connections you have that can help, all of that you must outline and present. The potential payoff is huge. As is, I see a lot of missed opportunity. So here are a few things I’d like for you to think about: Rugged-friendly design As immensely popular as consumer smartphones are, they really are not as user-friendly as they could be. Example: the smartphone industry decided that it’s super-fashionable to have displays that take up the entire surface of the device, and often even wrap around the perimeter. The result is that you can barely touch such devices without triggering unwanted action. Another example: they make them so sleek and slippery as to virtually guarantee that they slip out of one’s hand. And surfaces are so gleaming and glossy that they are certain to crack or scratch. Rugged handheld manufacturers must stay away from that. Yes, there is great temptation to make rugged handhelds look just as trendy as consumer smartphones, but it should not come at the cost of common sense. Smartphone makers love flat, flush surfaces without margins around them and without any protective recess at all. And even many rugged device manufacturers make their devices much too sli…
creator: conradb212
date: 2022-04-19T20:57:49+00:00

Intel’s 12th generation “Alder Lake” Hybrid processors
type: item
description: Contemplations about a whole new future of mobile chips in rugged laptops and tablets. It isn’t easy to keep up with Intel’s prolific introduction of ever more processors, processor types and processor generations. Or to figure out what truly matters and what’s incremental and more marketing than compelling advancement. That’s unfortunate as Intel, from time to time, does introduce milestone products and technologies. With their 12th generation of Core processors the company is introducing such a milestone, but it isn’t quite clear just yet what its impact will be. So what is so special about the 12th generation, code-named Alder Lake? It’s Intel’s first major venture into hybrid processors. Most are familiar with the hybrid concept from vehicles where the combination of an electric and a combustion engine makes for more economic operation — better gas mileage. But what does “hybrid” mean in the context of processors? Better gas mileage, too, but in a different way. Whereas hybrid vehicles employ two completely different technologies to maximize economy — electricity and gasoline — hybrid processors use the same technology to reach the goal of greater economy. Specifically, Intel combines complex high-performance cores — p-cores — with much simpler economy cores — e-cores — to get the best of both worlds, high performance AND economical operation. This means that this kind of “hybrid” is a little different from the “hybrid” in cars. In hybrid vehicles the combustion engine shoulders most of the performance load whereas the battery-driven electric motor helps out and may also power the car all by itself at low speeds. Part of the kinetic energy inherent in a moving vehicle can be recaptured when braking by charging the battery, making overall operation even more economical. This by now very mature technology greatly improves gas mileage — my own hybrid vehicle, a Hyundai Ioniq gets around 60mpg. While mostly employed to boost economy and reduce emissions in the proce…
creator: conradb212
date: 2022-02-20T21:38:27+00:00

Thunderbolt 4 and other tech issues
type: item
description: Here at RuggedPCReview we see new stuff every day. New rugged handhelds, tablets and laptops. New technologies, new trends, updates, enhancements, new standards, new priorities. Most makes sense, but not everything. And sometimes we come across issues that are hard to figure out. This past year we've had three of them. One was Intel's apparent decision to hand over more processor configuration leeway to hardware manufacturers in its 11th generation of Core processors. Instead of Intel setting all the parameters to keep chips from overheating, systems designers can now tweak the chips for their articular platforms and markets. As a result, standard performance benchmarks can no longer predict as accurately how a particular device compares to its competition. Another was a peculiar limitation on Intel's highly touted new Iris Xe graphics that came with that same 11th generation of Core processors. The confusion there was that those graphics apparently depended on not only the type of memory installed in a machine, but also of the number and use of memory card slots. And a third surrounded, again with the introduction of Intel's 11th generation of Core processors, the inclusion of Thunderbolt 4 capability into the chips. There, it quickly became apparent to us that Thunderbolt 4 was a finicky and rather vague thing that, for now, worked in some hardware and with some peripherals but not in others. Each of these three issues has a direct impact on customers. Which makes the vagueness surrounding these enhancements baffling. Finding solid information on each of those three areas was and is next to impossible. Intel won't talk; questions sent to the appropriate Intel group are generally either ignored or, after several reminders, brushed off with a brief general statement that answers nothing. That leaves us in the unenviable position of knowing that something is wrong or, at least, needs detailed explanation, without being able to get enough information to authoritativel…
creator: conradb212
date: 2022-01-11T15:04:19+00:00

On Image-Stabilizing Binoculars
type: item
description: If you use binoculars on the job, or anywhere else, you simply have to check out the image-stabilization kind. It makes a HUGE difference. Let me explain why and how. A good set of binoculars is often part of the gear used on the job or in the field, helping with surveys, surveillance, assessments, exploration, search & rescue and more. And a set of binoculars is almost standard equipment for anyone into wildlife observation or just generally getting a closer look at scenery or points of interest. For all those reasons almost everyone has a set or at least has used a set, and thus is familiar with the one inevitable problem with binoculars — holding them still enough to actually see what you’re looking at. You can get a closer look with binoculars via the 7x to 12x magnification that the vast majority of them offer, but due to the inevitable slight jitters that come with holding binoculars even by the most steady-handed individuals, it’s frustratingly difficult to actually focus on something. That’s because the human eye has different kinds of vision. While the full viewing angle of human vision is around 210 degrees, the visual field is more like 120 degrees or so, the central field of vision an even narrower 50 to 60 degrees, and what’s called “foveal vision” — the truly sharp focal point — is just one or two degrees. What does that mean? There are various definitions of those different fields of vision, but it generally boils down to this: while the design of the human eyes and their placement in the human head technically offers a very wide viewing angle between both eyes, what we actually comprehend falls within a much narrower angle. Our “peripheral” vision is mostly limited to registering movement. We can tell that there is movement, but not what it is. The context we’re in may add information: on a highway the movement is likely a another vehicle and walking down the street it’s likely another person, but in order to verify that we need to move our eyes to t…
creator: conradb212
date: 2022-01-05T22:43:01+00:00

The Ingress Protection Rating
type: item
description: About ruggedness testing and why the ingress protection rating of mobile computers is especially important What sets rugged handheld computers and tablets apart from standard consumer products is their ability to take the kind of punishment that comes with using a device on the job and in the field where conditions can be harsh. As a result, the specification sheets of virtually all rugged devices include the results of certain ruggedness tests. How much of that data is supplied varies from manufacturer to manufacturer. It can be very comprehensive or just touch upon the basics. There are arguments to be made for both approaches – a lot or just a bit. Ruggedness testing data can be very dry and not always easy to interpret. “Operating 10 G peak acceleration (11 ms duration),” for example, doesn’t easily convey how much shock a device can handle before it breaks. Or it can be too vague, like “MIL-STD-810H compliant,” where said standard is over a thousand pages of densely packed tech info, and simply referring to it doesn’t say anything. There is, however, a happy medium – device specs that include the few items that matter most, and then have more comprehensive data on file for customers who ask for it or really need it. But what are those few specs that really matter? The general answer is, as is so often the case when it comes to ruggedness – it depends. If you work in or around commercial freezers and need to use your device all day long, you need to know what temperatures it can handle. If you’re a pilot and fly unpressurized planes, you need to know if air pressure differences are an issue. If you work at a port or in a boat, salt fog resistance is important. And so on. Of all the ruggedness specs, there are two that matter most and are of most importance to almost every user. One is the “drop spec,” i.e. from what height can a device be dropped and still survive the fall unharmed. Virtually every device will be dropped at some point, and so the drop spec matte…
creator: conradb212
date: 2021-11-04T20:44:00+00:00

The Intel Iris Xe Graphics mystery
type: item
description: When things hidden in fine print can mean the difference between your computer being fast or sluggish Until about a decade ago, most computer processors did not include graphics. Graphics were part of the chipsets that worked in tandem with CPUs, and if that wasn't good enough, there were separate graphics cards. Around 2010, wanting to play a bigger part in graphics, Intel began integrating graphics directly into the CPU, and that's the way it's been ever since. Intel's integrated graphics are plenty good enough for most work, but there are tasks and industries that need more graphics firepower. CAD (Computer-Aided Design), high-end imaging, 3D graphics are examples that need more graphics punch. And computer gamers will tell you that there's never enough graphics performance for their ever more complex games. That's where modern-day graphics cards come. Some are big, heavy add-on cards with their own fans and power supplies, costing thousands of dollars. Others are simpler and more affordable, and some are just modules. Rugged laptops and high-end tablets often have "discrete" graphics options. These have their own memory and power source, and provide significantly higher performance than the graphics integrated into CPUs. Being sensitive to the demand for more graphics power, Intel has been enhancing the graphics integrated into their processors for years, often using them to distinguish processors from one another. Higher-end integrated graphics often carried the "Iris" name, and the Intel "Tiger Lake" 11th generation processors we're now seeing in high end rugged laptops and tablets come with integrated Intel Iris Xe graphics. Intel considers that a good step up from the Intel UHD Graphics in earlier processor generations. The "Xe" indicates a new and more powerful instruction set architecture. Why this whole preamble? Because things are getting a bit confusing. I noticed this when we recently reviewed some of the latest rugged laptops and tablets based on Inte…
creator: conradb212
date: 2021-08-22T20:41:19+00:00

Thunderbolt 4
type: item
description: Is it the crowning "one wire" connectivity and charging answer to the increasingly fragmented USB landscape? by Conrad H. Blickenstorfer With computers, no matter what kind of computer, connectivity is everything. If there's no cell service or no WiFi, one is disconnected from the world. And it's pretty much the same with wires and cables. Unless you have the right ones with the right plugs you're out of luck. That was a very big deal in the early days of PCs when PCs and peripherals connected either with a serial or a parallel cable. That sounds simple, but it wasn't. While the connectors were more or less standard, different companies often assigned different functions to different pins and one needed a special "driver" to make it work. Sometimes dip switches were involved or little adapter boxes where you could set the proper connections between all the wires. That went on for a good decade and a half after PCs first appeared. In the mid 1990s USB, the Universal Serial Bus, appeared and promised to put an end of all that incompatibility and frustration. The intent of USB was to bring simple "plug and play" functionality. If the PC and the peripheral both had USB ports, you simply connected them and it worked. In real life it wasn't that easy. USB, too, needed drivers and it took a good many years for most things to be truly "plug and play." USB now It's now a quarter of a century later and USB is still with us. USB is everywhere. The Universal Serial Bus has indeed become universal. Pretty much every device has one or more USB ports. And yet, USB isn't really completely universal. As technology advances and makes computers more and more powerful, the original USB standard soon was no longer quick and flexible enough to meet emerging demands. The original USB 1.0 standard wasn't very fast and could only transfer in one direction at a time. USB 2.0 was faster but still couldn't transmit data both ways simultaneously. That was fixed in USB 3.0 (you can tell that a U…
creator: conradb212
date: 2021-07-20T20:36:03+00:00

Intel generations
type: item
description: With the rapid succession of Intel Core processor generations it’s difficult to keep track of what’s available, what it can do for you, and what really matters when selecting the most suitable processor for your systems. It seems like only yesterday that Intel introduced the high-end Core processor brand, and now it's a decade later and we’re already seeing the 11th generation. While initially it wasn’t very difficult to keep the generations apart and determine when and what to buy, it’s become quite confusing as of late. Initially, generations happened at what Intel called the Tick-Tock pace, where Tick meant a new architecture or processing technology and Tock meant refinement, that’s no longer the case. And while initially each new generation brought very tangible technology and performance benefits, that’s no longer necessarily the case. Fundamental technological progress has slowed down as it’s becoming ever more difficult to miniaturize processing technology yet again. There are also overlaps of generations as well as additional complexity due to additions of Intel’s initial i3/i5/i7 “good/better/best” designations. So let’s take a look at various areas, aspects and issues regarding the processor family that drives the vast majority of mobile Windows computers today. Overall importance and position — Even more so than on the desktop where Intel has some competition from AMD, Intel totally dominates the market for high-end, high-performance mobile processors. For the purpose of this discussion, the term “mobile” isn’t strictly limited to non-stationary devices, but also to those where thermal considerations mandate use of processors that balance performance with low power consumption (and therefore low heat generation). Intel generally describes such processors as “ultra-low voltage” with thermal design power of 15 watts or less. This includes not just laptops, tablets and handhelds, but also a good number of panel computers and embedded systems. So many differ…
creator: conradb212
date: 2021-03-24T20:34:43+00:00

DJI Enterprise -- Drones are becoming serious business
type: item
description: Every time I see a crew set up ladders around a building to examine a reef, assess damage, or determine how to maintain or expand a structure, I wonder why they don't use drones instead. Drones eliminate the cost of transporting and setting up ladders and scaffolds, eliminate the danger of accidents, and get the job done so much faster. We view drones as an increasingly important part of work in the field. They are your eye in the sky, they go places where humans cannot easily go, and they can easily shoot still images and video that help getting projects done faster and better. Drones have huge potential in extending the reach of today's rugged mobile computing technology into the sky, and they can do so easily and inexpensively. Why have most enterprises that could benefit from drones not started using them? Maybe it is because many still think of drones as toys. But drones have grown up to be stunningly competent and useful tools. DJI, the market leader in drones, has been working to expand awareness of the many ways drones can help industry and enterprise. Their DJI Enterprise site contains a wealth of information on how drones can be used today. They also published the below video on drone solutions for a new generation of work. There's significant synergy between rugged computing and drone technology. We hope to soon see examples of drones becoming integrated into mobile technology workflows, extend those workflows, and branch out into new opportunities.
creator: conradb212
date: 2021-02-17T20:32:43+00:00

Consumer Smartphones vs Rugged Handhelds
type: item
description: What is the difference between consumer smartphones and handheld computers that have specifically been designed to be rugged and capable of withstanding a variety of handling and environmental challenges? That is a question that's been asked ever since the advent of modern smartphones, which is generally since the Apple iPhone was introduced in 2007. Opportunity or challenge? The question comes up because the massive global (and initially unanticipated) success of smartphones has been both a big opportunity for the rugged handheld industry, as well as a frustrating challenge. It was an opportunity because the increasingly universal use of and ensuing familiarity with smartphones opened new markets for handheld computers. Many of these were markets where automation was not previously considered or considered feasible. Many rugged handheld manufacturers and resellers saw the possibility of vastly increased sales. The challenge, however, turned out to be many customers’ decision to go with consumer smartphones in protective cases. A good number of national chains decided to go this way, purchasing large numbers of smartphones in a case. If they broke, they would simply be replaced. As a result, rugged handheld manufacturers did not see the anticipated growth in sales. This has been a much debated issue in the industry. It all, of course, comes down to total cost of ownership. For years, makers of rugged computing gear have claimed that the total cost of ownership of rugged gear is lower than that of using consumer tech in a case. Pros and cons As for commentary and discussion, on the surface one would think that consumer smartphones, almost invariably wafer-thin, would be ill-suited for use on the job. It is indeed unclear why consumer smartphones must be as slender and fragile as they are. There seems no other reason other than fashion and marketing. As is, there's the paradox that people buy millions of sleek colorful phones because they look so good, but they can't …
subject: RuggedPCReview
creator: conradb212
date: 2020-01-18T20:25:20+00:00