Psion Releases A Rugged, Water-Tight PDA

Moghedien writes: "This time a sturdy PDA, without a keyboard, but a big hi-res screen and it's designed for work in the field. Still runs the EPOC OS, 8 hour battery life time, probably a 200MHz StrongARM, 64MB RAM and MMC. It measures 215x85x28 mm. It has an IP rate of 67, meaning it's capable of lying under water for hours, and it can put up with a fall of 1.5 meters against concrete. According to Psion, its purpose is to fill the gap between powerful PDAs for the industry and handheld machines for the professional consumer market." There's a blurb describing this device on Psion's site -- but does anyone see pictures? Update: 10/01 13:35 GMT by T : An anonymous reader says: "Here is the page for the NetPad. It has a small picture, but it's better than nothing."

Comments

caffine rush

[spacefem]

PDA's don't need to take water, just coffee. They should really be tested that way: just fire-hosed with gallons of boiling expresso or something. I'm sure this one could take it.

Toilet Savior

[MrNovember]

Handy for when you have your PDA in your shirt pocket and bend over the john to pull your pants off -- plop.

specs & small photo

[jamner]

This appears to be Psion Teklogix NetPad(r) Main Page. A small photo is included.
Here is the spec sheet (96.6Kb.pdf)

Heise article had a picture

[mbyte]

See the c't article from heise:

Heise

Your comment violated the postercomment compression filter. Comment aborted

Droppables

[mmaddox]

Having owned droppable computers for some time, I'm really about ready for a computer that's capable of portability without the awful fragility. If this computer has some reasonable I/O method available (say, some form of attachable mini-keyboard, a la Targus), it might be usable, but it seems like just another data-collection device from its description.

Why doesn't the ruggedized PC hit the mainstream market? Walkabout has made a few nice PC's in tablet form, but their prices generally put off the buyer that has no specialized application in mind. I'd absolutely love a nice, sturdy, portable 'nix box like their HH3. Why haven't at least SOME of these ideas made it into the consumer models of laptops and the like?

Casio has been there, done that....

[cyborg_munkee]

Casio has offered these type of devices for quite some time now.

Note: this is from Psion Teklogix

[biglig2]

This division of Psion is seperate from the division behind the series 3 and 5 - it makes industrial PDA's. You see their very sucessful Walkabout device in shops over here in the UK a lot - mostly the models a barcode scanner is used in stock control.

They do quite well. For all Compaq's adverts of someone walking thru a factory with an iPaq, there are places where the environment is just too nasty - freezers for example.

I always fancied their netbook, which is a corporate variant on the Psion series 7 (the one that's an EPOC handheld in notebook form-factor, with a full size color screen etc.)

How IP ratings work

[dingbat_hp]

I'd be interested to see what an IP Rate of 100 (or zero, whichever is better, also assuming a 100 point scale) could handle.

IP ratings don't work quite like that. Rather than a 0..100 scale, they're actually a string concatenation of three 0+ scales. High numbers are better. First number is dust rating (0..6), second fluids (0..8), third mechanical impact (0..9). IP67 means "no ingress of dust", "short-term water immersion to 1m" and no description of mechanical impact strength.

There's a few on-line resources around with the full list.