Slashdot Mirror
Land Rover Unveils "World's Toughest Phone"
Land Rover says their new S1 mobile is the world's strongest phone. Testing done by Land Rover and the staff at The Sun showed the S1 would still work after being stepped on by an elephant, run over by a Land Rover, dropped from a second-story window, buried in mud, soaked in a pint of beer, and roasted in an oven at 150 degrees centigrade. A forklift truck proved to be its match, and was able to crush the S1 under its three-tonne weight. The phone comes with 1,500 hours of battery life, a 2.0 megapixel camera, an extra loud ringtone and an unconditional three-year guarantee.
...but does it blend?
I read "World's Thoughest iPhone". Think I have to stay off the Apple news for a while...
Naomi Campbell is first on the waiting list to get one.
Nothing can stop her now.
A forklift truck proved to be its match, and was able to crush the S1 under its three-tonne weight
Well then it's no good to me.
Either one could be given a bowling ball in an empty room...and 5 minutes later come out with a bucket full of pieces.
The truly amazing thing isn't that they can destroy a bowling ball in under 5 minutes. It's that they were able to craft a bucket using the pieces.
Was it given to an eight year old boy? Those tender little blossoms can destroy anything.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
...Just take better care of your shit.
Or don't have a job where you are in a rough environment.
As it said in TFA, this is just the thing for tradesmen.
I regularly see electricians, plumbers, carpenters and movers phones being dropped from ladders, or bashed into in some way. Or splashed with anything from paint to concrete to sewage.
It's a tool for them, and as such it needs to be durable. Just like their other tools.
---
"I can't complain, but sometimes still do..." Joe Walsh
62.5 days of battery life?! Is this for real!?
Yes, when attached to your Land Rover.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
When she goes out with her friends, she leaves the Blackberry at home and puts her SIM into a cheap LG phone. If the phone gets lost or damaged it isn't as big of a deal.
She does it so you don't see her calling history and can't track her via GPS to see what she's actually doing. Don't be naive man! Her tinfoil hat is even thicker than the average slashdotter's
Not hard at all to believe.
When cell phones went smaller, their battery packs also became smaller. In size and in capacity (of course more in size).
A battery the size of the one in my old Nokia 5510, but made from LiPO, would have about 5-10 times the capacity of the tiny batteries in modern phones.
As a modern phone will last a week in standby easily, even with those small 300mAh cells, i think 62 days is entirely reasonable if one can live with the phone being 100g heavier.
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
If you get one of these and it breaks, You should just stop getting cell phones. Clearly they are not for you~
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Most of those tests aren't as impressive as they sound.
The Beer/Mud tests are, effectively, the same thing. The phone's waterproofing gaskets will either hold the moisture out or they won't, much like a water proof watch. This gets even easier to accomplish if they installed an iPhone style "permanent" battery, eliminated the headset jack in favor of Bluetooth, and installed an inductive charging system like a cordless toothbrush.
The test where it's being run over by a Land Rover is easier than it sounds because the flexibility of the tires serves to spread out the weight of the vehicle. As long as they don't over-inflate the tires or use ultra-high efficiency/low rolling resistance tires then the actual PSI on the phone should be relatively low. Coincidental, they featured a stunt just like this last night on that Billy Mays show "Pitchmen". In the show they were trying to sell a gel pad designed to absorb force so they ran over one of the salesmen's hands with an SUV. As for the elephant, I don't know enough about the forces at the bottom of an elephant's foot but it might be the same issue. Another thing to consider is how soft the surface was under the tire or the elephants foot. If either was done on earth instead of pavement/concrete then that will play a factor too.
Inversely, the above explanation serves to explain why the phone, finally, broke under the forklift. The tires on most forklifts I've ever seen tend to be made of a very hard rubber-like material (possibly just pure natural rubber). I'm sure that this manages to eliminate the need to replace tires over the life of the forklift and forklifts don't need the shock absorbing effects of a pneumatic tire since they move so slow and are only designed to be used over very flat surfaces. The hard tires transmit a much higher percentage of the forklift's weight to a much smaller patch of ground and the 3 ton forklift is, probably, as heavy or heavier than the Land Rover.
As for being dropped from a second story window, I would want to know what kind of surface it was dropped on. It would be much more impressive if it were dropped onto concrete. It would be less impressive if it were dropped onto thick grass and much less impressive if it were dropped onto a mattress (I doubt that one but, as it wasn't mentioned, I wouldn't put it past some marketing agencies).
As for the oven test, I would want to know how long it was left in. 150C is a pretty high temperature but people have been walking over 1000+ degree Fahrenheit coals for a long time and I've seen Shaolin monks lick red hot pokers. The trick is how long your body part is in contact with the hot stuff. In both cases, you move your foot/tough away from the contact immediately and don't give enough time for most of the heat to transfer. In the case of licking the red hot poker, they also have a thick layer of spit on their tough that absorbs much of the heat and evaporates away protecting the tongue.
Rules of Conduct:
#1 - The DM is always right.
#2 - If the DM is wrong, see rule #1
As an IT Manager for a construction company, one thing I've been looking for is a phone that field people cannot break within a week. The defacto standard (or former standard) would be Nextel, but the new Motorola units they've been pushing are anything short of unbreakable. Gone are the days of the bulletproof brickphone that you can run over with a grader and it still live to make another call. Motorola's replacements for the bricks are rather flimsy flip phones and rather weak candybar phones.
Well, on to Verizon we go (for the better coverage and cheaper costs) and we get into their "hardened" phones...the Casio/Verizon GZ1 Boulder, which is a complete and utter joke of misnomer. These units are the worst designed hardened units I've ever seen. The battery retention mechanism (a metal looking but actually plastic screw) will break off/apart after 1 drop and breaks the phone unless you have some duct tape handy to hold your battery in place. Of the 4 dozen we've taken delivery of, we had to replace two as DOA out of the box (bad sign #1) and 4 more within a week (bad sign #2) Now they have a problem with losing the call logs which Verizon is already aware of and the unit needs a firmware update.
If this Land Rover unit is actually as good as it says it is, US cell phone companies should take note. THIS is what we want (in construction) - not these half assed phones that Verizon and Nextel put out. I want something I can hand to my people and say "See you in a year or two" ... not next week after it gets dropped twice.
Extra loud ringtone?
Buy shares in forklift manufacturers.
It's the Sun. If phones had breasts the picture would have been fine, but the photographer didn't know what to do when they said "hey, photograph this".
As in, if you smash the device into an iPhone, you can kill the iPhone and the device in question will keep working. Given what the G1 and Palm Pre have turned out to be, this is the only true valid definition of the term "iPhone killer" in the market today;)
*** Sigs are a stupid waste of bandwidth.
The phone is fragile. Less fragile, but it has considerably more chinks than my SIM card. If the phone numbers are the important thing, keep them on the SIM. They cost what - $0.02? $0.05?
I can't understand why, aside from status, anyone would need this particular phone. Granted, it's a ruggedized phone with GPS, but the screen is something from 2002, barely pocketizable, and has glitzy buttons. What kind of GPS could it be packing, if it's (A:) a proprietary phone, (B:) has 600 pixels to work with? If location was so important to me, and I were driving my Land Rover, or my Hyundai (and pretending it's more than it is), why wouldn't I put my eggs in more baskets, and bring along my Suunto watch, TomTom, or traditional GPS unit?
If the ability to make a phone call after leaving your phone in a pint (or similarly brown, wet, and bubbly environment) is the question, how is this better than my SIM alone, with a spare clunker phone/charger in the glovebox?
I bet an average SIM could tolerate 3 tonnes of compression without a sneeze.
dust kills my phones... I work in the tile laying business
Its a bummer that Land Rover gets the "yuppie" label. Thats pretty much what I always thought too. Then a friend got one for the right reasons(to drive it off-road), and he invited me to ride along on the half day land rover course down in Carmel. The guy showed us all the features, and how they worked and how to use them. Then we went and spent the rest of the time doing actual driving. Leaning the rover over so far on its side I still don't know how it didn't fall over. Getting the rover on 3 wheels with one 2-3 feet in the air, then going forward until it tipped the weight from the back right to front left. Going up and down hills way steeper than I thought you could. The traction controls systems in the rover is very impressive, it even has an auto decent feature. Yes to descend a steep hill you sit at the top with the brake on, then you just take your foot off everything. You just steer, the car controls the descent and keeps the wheels turning so you can always steer. Your brain really makes that hard. So counter intuitive. The whole thing is done with the stock street tires. The instructor even let us get the car up around 40 and then hit the all stop switch. It really stops the car fast. :)
So while it still is mostly driven by yuppies that will probably never go over a rock bigger than gravel, they really are impressive machines that are built to live offroad. So while I bet lots of yuppies buy the phone too, if it is designed like their rovers its probably pretty durable.
Some years back I had a Series IIa short wheelbase job. Bought secondhand of course and reconditioned. No traction control, just 2-wheel and 4-wheel selection then low and high ration. The original spec was 45 degs tip in any direction with a ton in the back. I took mine on 30% roads and up and down hills off-road. Don't think I made the 45 degrees slopes though.
The downside was this was a true landrover - the main cushioning was your ass and it drank fuel. Eventually, I had to give it up.
See my journal, I write things there
..that's the only thing I have found that works for me on the farm. Top pocket, with a secured button. Anything in my pants pocket or on a holster, etc is due for a drop or a smashing. A shirt pocket with no button, same thing, lean over, out it goes, and around where I work, that could be right into a pile of cow exhaust or in the swamp/mud, etc.. The other thing cellphones don't seem to have is a lanyard loop. The sleeves sometimes have then, but the phone itself needs one, so you can put your own "safe" on them when doing work off the ground or whatever, just like with your other tools. If you drop it accidentally, it's only going a coupla feet then and easy enough to retrieve it.
Anyway, this is why I only use cheap prepaid phones now. If they get creamed, no biggee really. I would *like* a full featured smartphone, but can't take a chance on them, just too wuss and too expensive at the same time.
I honestly don't think there's a single cellphone designer out there who has ever worked a normal hard blue collar job before, else a good simple basic phone might exist for this market. It has to have buttons that can work with gloves on if necessary, at least for the main function of making and answering calls, have a readable screen in bright daylight, not have a weak case, be able to take getting washed off with the garden hose, etc. Maybe these landrover phones are OK, no idea really, but I've never seen a phone here that was any good in the rugged department. It can be larger and heavier, who cares, you know we carry weight all the time, those designers seem to think a lb would induce a hernia or something. Cellphones nowadays seem designed for very young people, children really, with teeny delicate fingers, and always using the phones inside someplace under climate control and artificial light.
I wonder if there would be a market for taking people's cellphones (the few nice ones that guys like us want, but are impractical to carry) and just physically fitting them into better cases, and doing the other things necessary to make them tougher and more functional? I mean physically remove all the electronics and stick that in a totally different case that was blue collar emphasis designed? Cellphone case mods.
Ask an American laborer whether they would buy four $50 phones or one $200 phone.
And while you're at it, ask him how much it is worth to him if his phone dies early in the day, and he's not be able to receive calls from potential clients until he gets finished the current job and gets to a phone store to buy another $50 phone.
---
"I can't complain, but sometimes still do..." Joe Walsh
I work for a timber distributer. I have to provide phones to warehouse staff, lorry loaders and sawmill operators. Even if the environment wasn't so hostile I think the workmen would be! We have a large site with lots of warehouses so phones are essential to get the job done.
I have one loader who in the last few years has been through several Nokia 6310s, a Nokia 5210, 5410, and a JCB phone. The JCB was supposed to be indistructible and had a similar demo video to this Land Rover phone but he still broke it. At least they gave me a refund without arguing.
A latent existence