RuggedPCReview Blog

January 28, 2010

Talking with Paul Moore, Fujitsu's Senior Director of Product Development

The other day I had a very interesting hour-long conversation with Paul Moore, who is Senior Director of Mobile Product Development at Fujitsu. The call was arranged by Fujitsu's ever helpful Wendy Grubow to give me a chance to talk with Paul about the Fujitsu Lifebook T4410 Tablet PC that's currently in the RuggedPCReview.com lab for evaluation and testing.

Fujitsu, of course, has been into tablets longer than most and probably has the most experience of any Tablet PC and convertible vendors. Fujitsu had the PoquetPAD and 325Point tablets a decade before IBM reinvented the Tablet PC in 2002, and the company is now in something like the 40th generation of tablet technology. Yes, the 40th. During the 1990s, Fujitsu built a successful business around vertical market slate computers, most notably the Point and Stylistic models, with the latter line carrying on to this day. For a while Fujitsu also offered Windows CE-based devices such as the PenCentra line. Fujitsu also offered small business-oriented notebooks with pens when almost no one else did. What it all boils down to is that there's no one who has more corporate DNA in tablet and slate computers in any number of form factors.

Paul pointed out that at this point, Fujitsu is the only company that offers both slate AND convertible computers. There are many that have a notebook convertible in their lineups, such as Dell and HP, and there are some that only offer tablets, such as Motion Computing, but no one offers both in their market (one could argue that DRS ARMOR and a couple others do offer both platforms, but those are in the heavily rugged markets).

Anyway, it was interesting to hear Paul tell that Fujitsu is seeing a heavy migration from tablet to convertible. Customers are transitioning from the Stylistics to the more conventional Lifebook convertible notebooks that can also be used as slates by rotating the display and laying it down flat on top of the keyboard. That probably explains why Fujitsu is now down to one single model in the Stylistic line, the Stylistic ST6012, whereas the company offers no fewer than six different convertibles (the Lifebook T1010, T1630, T2020, T4310, T4410, and T5010).

With Panasonic making a big issue out of their rugged computers still being made in Japan, I asked Paul if the Fujitsu tablets and convertibles are also still made in Japan. The answer was yes, all Lifebook tablets are made in Japan, and all E-Series machines as well. However, while with Panasonic it was pretty clear that they made a connection of made in Japan = much lower failure rates, Fujitsu makes no such claim. Paul said failure rate stats are compiled, but given the vast differences in markets served makes any meaningful comparison essentially impossible.

I asked Paul why Fujitsu does not market its computers as "business-rugged," "semi-rugged," or one of the other ruggedness categories. The unequivocal answer: We don't have rugged tablets. Ours are durable, well-built, according to the markets we serve. We don't lose many customers because of ruggedness requirements. Fair enough. Full or even partial ruggedness can add a lot of cost and weight, so if it is not needed, why add it. Paul points out useful features that prolong the life of a computer, like a user-cleanable dust filter, accelerometer-based hard disk protection, a display hinge that rotates in both directions so it won't get damaged by inadvertently turning it the wrong direction, and so on.

With reference to the rotating display hinge, I asked Paul whether he knew why all Tablet PCs since 2001 have been designed with the same exact rotating hinge that lets users rotate the display and then fold it flat on top of the keyboard, LCD facing up. This is a good solution, but in notebook mode, the display flexes when you tap it with the pen. In the 1990s there had been several alternate solutions that minimized or eliminated the flex problem, but they are all gone. Paul said he wasn't aware of any patent protection or other reason why designers should be limited to the rotating displays, but it's a solution that works, flexing is not an issue when the device is used in tablet mode, and with the increasing importance of touch, flexing again is not an issue. Cost, too, might be an issue in staying with standardized solutions.

We also discussed the inherent suitability of a full desktop operating system for tablet and touch use. In my opinion, Windows itself has always been a major factor standing in the way of widespread tablet adoption; it's simply not suitable for pen operation. Paul felt that Windows 7 has made great strides towards better usability, but that in vertical markets it's really all about custom applications anyway, and those are usually optimized for whatever input medium is used.

With the recent advent of Intel's new Piketon and Calpella processor/chipset platforms I asked Paul what Fujitsu's plans were for the Intel Core i3/i5/i7 processors. His answer was that, for the most part, they prefer to use standard voltage processors that generally cost less, offer better performance, and represent an overall better value for users. Based on the benchmark result of our review unit that's equipped with a 2.53GHz Core 2 Duo P8700 with a thermal design power of 25 watts, we see no immediate reason for a chip upgrade: the T4410 scored the highest overall performance results of any Tablet PC we have ever tested, and it still had an idle power draw of just 9.9 watts, barely more than most Atom-based systems.

Posted by conradb212 at 06:35 PM | Comments (0)

January 26, 2010

Tablet hype at fever pitch

A day before an Apple event where Steve Jobs will announce a new computing device, the hype about tablets is at an absolute fever pitch. Experts are popping out from the woodwork, showering us with their wisdom and predictions, most apparently believing that Microsoft invented and introduced the tablet in 2001, which couldn't be farther from the truth. But, perhaps, if enough instant experts say it's so, history has been rewritten. What will those instant experts do when they discover that the original early 1990s IBM Thinkpad was a tablet, and that we had the same exact tablet hype back in 1989/92?

That said, if Apple indeed releases a tablet device, it may well change things quite a bit.

Posted by conradb212 at 05:08 PM | Comments (0)

January 07, 2010

Slate and tablet computers: learning from the past

According to CNN, tablet-sized computers are now "a much-hyped category of electronics." True. The Associated Press says, "Tablet-style computers that run Windows have been available for a decade." Yes, and a lot longer than that. And a PC World editor states, "Tablet PC's are not new. The slate form factor portable computer has been around for almost a decade, since Microsoft initially pushed the concept with its Windows XP Tablet PC Edition." Nope. Microsoft did not initially push the concept with the XP Tablet PC Edition. Microsoft released a tablet OS way before that, in 1991, and even then it was just a reaction to what others had done before.

This shows how soon we forget. Or perhaps how effective current coverage has been in creating the impression that Microsoft invented tablet computers in 2001, rewriting history in the process. Fact is, slate and tablet computers have been around for a good 20 years, and in 1991, there was as much hype about slates as we have today.

A bit of slate computer history

In the late 1980s, early pen computer systems generated a lot of excitement and there was a time when it was thought they might eventually replace conventional computers with keyboards. After all, everyone knows how to use a pen and pens are certainly less intimidating than keyboards.
Pen computers, as envisioned in the 1980s, were built around handwriting recognition. In the early 1980s, handwriting recognition was seen as an important future technology. Nobel prize winner Dr. Charles Elbaum started Nestor and developed the NestorWriter handwriting recognizer. Communication Intelligence Corporation created the Handwriter recognition system, and there were many others.

In 1991, the pen computing hype was at a peak. The pen was seen as a challenge to the mouse, and pen computers as a replacement for desktops. Microsoft, seeing slates as a potentially serious competition to Windows computers, announced Pen Extensions for Windows 3.1 and called them Windows for Pen Computing. Microsoft made some bold predictions about the advantages and success of pen systems that would take another ten years to even begin to materialize. In 1992, products arrived. GO Corporation released PenPoint. Lexicus released the Longhand handwriting recognition system. Microsoft released Windows for Pen Computing. Between 1992 and 1994, a number of companies introduced hardware to run Windows for Pen Computing or PenPoint. Among them were EO, NCR, Samsung (the picture to the right is a 1992 Samsung PenMaster), Dauphin, Fujitsu, TelePad, Compaq, Toshiba, and IBM. Few people remember that the original IBM ThinkPad was, as the name implies, a slate computer.

The computer press was first enthusiastic, then very critical when pen computers did not sell. They measured pen computers against desktop PCs with Windows software and most of them found pen tablets difficult to use. They also criticized handwriting recognition and said it did not work. After that, pen computer companies failed. Momenta closed in 1992. They had used up US$40 million in venture capital. Samsung and NCR did not introduce new products. Pen pioneer GRiD was bought by AST for its manufacturing capacity. AST stopped all pen projects. Dauphin, which was started by a Korean businessman named Alan Yong, went bankrupt, owing IBM over $40 million. GO was taken over by AT&T, and AT&T closed the company in August 1994 (after the memorable "fax on the beach" TV commercials). GO had lost almost US$70 million in venture capital. Compaq, IBM, NEC, and Toshiba all stopped making consumer market pen products in 1994 and 1995.

By 1995, pen computing was dead in the consumer market. Microsoft made a half-hearted attempt at including "Pen Services" in Windows 95, but slate computers had gone away, at least in consumer markets. It lived on in vertical and industrial markets. Companies such as Fujitsu Personal Systems, Husky, Telxon, Microslate, Intermec, Symbol Technologies, Xplore, and WalkAbout made and sold many pen tablets and pen slates.

That was, however, not the end of pen computing. Bill Gates had always been a believer in the technology, and you can see slate computers in many of Microsoft's various "computing in the future" presentations over the years. Once Microsoft reintroduced pen computers as the "Tablet PC" in 2002, slates and notebook convertibles made a comeback, and new companies such as Motion Computing joined the core of vertical and industrial market slate computers specialists.

So now tablets, or slates as Ballmer called them in his CES speech, are once again a "much-hyped category of electronics." The difference is that this time, thanks to Apple and the iPhone, tablets are to have multi-touch.

Let's hope all this works. Technology has come a very long way since those early days of tablet computers, but hype is never good if it's based on a flood of me-too products of a concept that has yet to prove it can work.

For an illustrated history of tablets and slates, see excerpts of "The Past and Future of Pen Computing" by RuggedPCReview.com editor Conrad H. Blickenstorfer, presented as a keynote address at the Taipei International Convention Center in December of 2001.

Posted by conradb212 at 04:37 PM | Comments (0)

January 04, 2010

Getac now offers 5-year warranties!

Sometimes the most amazing news is not a product announcement. That's what I thought when I saw Getac's press release about offering 5-year "bumper-to-bumper" warranties for all their rugged notebook computers. That's a long time.

According to Getac, the new warranty covers all of their fully rugged computers (i.e. the A790, B300, E100, M230 and V100 models) delivered on or after January first of this year. And the warranty includes "damage that occurs due to accidental acts and exposure to environmental conditions". According to Getac president Jim Rimay, they did that because in these tough economic times, computers are more likely replaced on a 5-year cycle instead of the 3-year upgrading cycle of more prosperous times. By offering a full 5-year warranty, customers will not incur additional service/warranty fees if they keep their equipment longer. The 5-year warranty is also a welcome change, the press release says, to governments and other large entities where getting approval for equipment repair can be a lengthy and involved process (it can, I've been there).

Five years is a long time, and especially so for a product that is designed to be used outdoors and under demanding environmental conditions where it is much more likely that computers are dropped, bumped around, rained on, and just generally experience conditions far from those in a nice, warm, clean office. It'd be interesting to know the actual mechanics of the warranty, what all is included, if certain items are excluded, what the turn-around is, shipment costs and so on. I am sure Getac thought this through, and we'll put in an inquiry to the folks at Getac.

How important are warranties and service in this field? Extremely so. I've personally visited the service and repair facilities of the leaders in the rugged computer market and came away more than impressed. Unlike in the commercial market where service is often hit-or-miss, with rugged systems failure rates, failure statistics and service turn-around times are meticulously recorded and managed. That's because with rugged systems, total cost of ownership matters and a good reputation for service and a good warranty definitely represent a strategic advantage.

Getac is on to something here, and offering a 5-year warranty definitely offers significant value-added to their products.

Posted by conradb212 at 04:18 PM | Comments (0)

December 22, 2009

New Atom processors: N450, D410 and D510

On December 21, 2009, Intel announced the next generation of Atom processors. The new generation of Atom processors includes the single core N450, the single core D410 and the dual-core D510.

Up to this announcement, millions of netbooks (as well as related devices such as tablets and boards) used the Atom N270 processor with its two companion chips, the ICH7M I/O chip and the 945GSE graphics and memory controller. The combo of the latter two is known as the Intel 945GSE Express chipset and makes for a total of three chips. Of N-Series processors released prior to this latest announcement, the Atom N280 was really just a very slightly faster N270 (1.66GHz vs 1.6GHz), and the Atom 330 (technically not N-series, but still in the "Diamondville" family as opposed to the more industrial "Silverthorne" Z-series Atoms) a dual-core version of the desktop-oriented Atom 230.

With the new chips, the big news is that Intel reduced the chip count from three to two by integrating the graphics and memory controller into the CPU itself. The old ICH7M I/O controller chip is replaced with the Intel NM10 Express. This means fewer chips to mount, lower power consumption, and, not mentioned, one less reason to seek third party chipsets (such as NVIDIA's Ion Graphics Processors).

Of the three new processors, the N450 is specifically geared towards netbooks whereas the D410 and D510 processors, all working in conjunction with the new NM10 I/O controller, are geared towards low-end desktops. The new NM10 I/O controller consumes just two watts compared to the older southbridge ICH7M's 3.3 watts. More amazingly, while the old GMCH display and memory controller with its 945GSE northbridge chip with GMA950 graphics consumed six watts, the Graphics Media Accelerator 3150-based integrated solution only adds about three watts to the consumption of the netbook-oriented N450 (chip max TDP (thermal design power, a measure of power consumption) 5.5 watts vs 2.5 watts of the N270 w/o graphics).

From what I can tell, the GMA3150 has hardware acceleration for MPEG-2 but not for H.264, so there's still no HD hardware decoding, which means a third-party HD decoder chip will come in handy. Onboard video is now likely to move from 17 : 10 aspect ratio 1024 x 600 pixel to a somewhat more palatable 1366 x 768 pixel, with significantly higher (2048 x 1536) external analog video possible (though some reports say that the N-Series chip is limited to 1400 x 1050, which would be less than what we have now). Somewhat surprisingly for a new chip, memory support is for DDR2 instead of the newer DDR3 standard.

Transistor count goes from the N270's 47 million to 225 million in the new single core models and 317 in the new dual-core chip, which means the CPU alone goes from 47 to 92 million transistors, with the graphics and memory controllers using about 133 million transistors. What exactly the extra 45 million transistors do is not clear as the tech specs look pretty much the same.

Note that Intel targets the D410 and D510 processors specifically for desktops. Though the D410 has the same clockspeed and uses the same NM10 I/O controller, it max TDP is almost twice that of the N450, 10 watts versus just 5.5. That's likely due to the graphics core running at twice the speed in D-series chips (400 vs 200MHz).

Overall, it doesn't look like the new Atoms, which have the Intel 64 extensions, will bring much of a performance improvement to netbooks and netbook-level rugged or embedded devices. Reducing the chip count from three to two is nice, but the Z-series processors already had that. Graphics seem somewhat improved, but not enough to make a huge difference, and there's still no HD playback hardware support. I am also not quite sure why the D410 and D510 processors are aimed at the desktop when the D410 chip combo has a total system TDP that's the same as that of the N270 and N280 (12 vs 11.8 watts), and the dual-core D510 just a bit more (15 vs. 11.8 watts). Also interesting is that Intel highlights the smaller footprint when it was a larger footprint that was lauded at the introduction of the "large package" P and PW series of industrial processors just a bit ago.

Overall, it's good to see these new Atom chips although I can't help but feeling that Intel looked out for itself more than adding compelling value for consumers.

Here is Intel's list of the entire Atom processor family.

Posted by conradb212 at 05:47 PM | Comments (0)

December 18, 2009

The Atom processor predicament

Well, this is going to be interesting. Despite the Intel Atom chips' modest performance, consumers have bought millions and millions of those little netbooks. I am quite certain they bought them because of the low price that made netbooks an impulse buy as opposed to spending more for a "real" notebook computer.

Whether or not customers are happy with their netbooks largely depends on how they use the computers. The small display with 1024 x 600 pixel resolution is confining for almost any real work as there's just not enough real estate. And while the term "netbook" implies that the devices are especially well suited for accessing the web and browsing around, that really isn't true. Netbooks are generally sluggish browsers and mostly unable to deliver adequate multimedia performance. And those who hoped to run HD video on their netbooks struck out completely, because first-gen netbooks simply couldn't do that at an acceptable pace.

On the other hand, the netbooks' small size and weight made them wonderful travel companions, and with an extended battery they practically ran forever on a charge (well, six hours or more in the case of my Acer Aspire One). And when hooked up to a big screen and a full-size keyboard, netbooks work really well as office computers. I hook up my little Acer to a 1680 x 1050 pixel 22-inch wide-screen.

However, we always want more, and so netbooks have been creeping up in size and power. Display size went from 7 to 8.9 inches, then 10.1 and now 12.1 inches. Which means netbooks are morphing ever closer to standard notebook range, which also means customers will continue to want and expect more. I mean, if the netbooks are so large now, why not an optical drive, and could we have the screen just a bit larger yet? Obviously, what customers really want is a device that costs as little as a netbook, but is as large and powerful as notebooks were before they became hefty giants with 19-inch ultra-wide-format displays.

Problem is, the Atom N270 simply isn't up to powering anything more than a little netbook, and even that just marginally. So Intel released the very slightly more powerful N280 and the dual-core N330. And NVIDIA came up with the NVIDIA Ion Graphics chipset that is supposed to work better with Atom N-Series chips than Intel's own chipset. I recently read a review of the Asus Eee PC 1201N netbook that uses both the N330 chip and the NVIDIA chipset, has a 1366 x 768 12.1-inch screen and lists for US$499. According to the review, you can now actually watch HD video, play many games, and things feel quite a bit less sluggish. Battery life is less than it was for the older, smaller netbooks, of course, and for 500 bucks you can easily get a "real" notebook with far higher performance and many more features.

Why do I bring all this up? Because the rugged market has also heavily invested in Atom technology and almost everyone has Atom devices in their lineup or pipeline. Almost all of them are based on either the Atom N270 or the Z510/530/540, i.e. the first generation of Atoms, the minimal ones with "targeted" performance. And now, just as we're starting to see nicely optimized Atom systems that live up to battery life expectations, some of those initial chips are already going to be replaced by the N280, N330 and soon by next gen Atom chips. That's bad news for rugged manufacturers whose first-gen Atom products are just now becoming available.

The moral of the Atom story is, at least for vertical market manufacturers: pick an Atom chip that Intel is likely to support for several years, and make certain the drivers are fully optimized and all the power saving features are fully implemented. Atom can deliver superior battery life and acceptable performance, but manufacturers must carefully target those products so customers won't be disappointed. We've seen Atom-based machines that use hardly less battery power than devices with much more powerful processors. That won't do. And we've seen some where non-optimized graphics drivers made the machines painful to use.

Using an automotive analogy, with the Atom Intel created a small and miserly 4-cylinder engine for use in fuel-efficient vehicles that provide adequate performance as long as the car isn't too big and heavy and customers have not been led to have unrealistic expectations. With the new and upcoming Atom chips, Intel is already making bigger, more powerful engines, obsoleting the earlier ones and giving in to the demand for more horsepower at the expense of efficiency and good design.

Posted by conradb212 at 01:41 AM | Comments (0)

October 29, 2009

Apple stores supposedly transitioning from WinMo to iPod Touch

Anyone who's ever been to an Apple store for an appointment or service knows the weird procedure where someone greets you at the door, takes your info, and then wirelessly sends it to some other Apple people who then come greet you when it's your time. Same for making payments away from the main desk and so on. It all works, but it's a bit odd, and even weirder is that some of that mobile check-in and checkout is done on non-Apple hardware (Symbol, actually) that's running Windows CE software. Supposedly it was done that way because Apple mobile gear couldn't handle bar codes and credit cards and such.

I always thought that was strange because there are all sorts of scanning and credit card processing apps available for the iPhone. And, in typical iPhone fashion, they are being used in cool, innovative ways. For example, there's an app ("Red Laser") that scans a barcode and then instantly checks the Web for the best prices for that product. That way you always know whether you're getting a good deal. There are also numerous apps for credit card processing. That should not come as a surprise in an era where banks are starting to allow you to remotely "deposit" checks from an iPhone.

Anyway, the folks at ifoapplestore.com now report that Apple stores may be transitioning to iPod Touches with an advanced scanner accessory and point-of-sale POS software for checkout. Other businesses are probably following in their path. And I can easily see iPhones and iPods being used in more industrial applications thanks to all those ruggedized cases available now (my favorite one is the Otterbox Defender). Can iPhone-based industrial-strength vertical market apps be far behind?

Posted by conradb212 at 06:36 PM | Comments (0)

October 23, 2009

Windows 7

Well, the much advertised public release date of Windows 7 has come and gone. The equivalent of "War and Peace" has been written on how wonderful it is and on how Microsoft "got it right" this time. Maybe they have and maybe they haven't. Here at RuggedPCReview.com, we've used Windows 7 on some of the rugged hardware we've had here for testing and evaluation recently and, frankly, it looked so much like Vista that we barely noticed anything was different.

At this point, I have mixed feelings. Almost all the rugged hardware that comes in here still runs Windows XP or the Tablet PC Edition or, increasingly, one of the embedded versions of Windows. It was actually interesting to see all those "XYZ recommends Vista" tag lines on manufacturers' websites and promotional materials when most of their machines really still ran XP.

So now Windows 7 is here, and Microsoft has been quite successful in creating the buzz that it's new and leaner and faster than Vista. Some of the industry pundits were practically falling all over themselves heaping praise upon Microsoft, so much so that it was almost embarrassing. Steve Wildstrom at Business Week, whose straightforward opinions I greatly respect, was quite critical over the unacceptable upgrade from XP to Windows 7 (reinstall every app from scratch) and how long the upgrade takes, but he also then said Windows 7 was "something truly better."

I think whether or not Windows 7 is indeed something truly better will eventually determine the fate of Windows 7. It looks so much like Vista that had it not been for Vista's questionable reputation, Microsoft probably would have simply called the "new" OS Vista Service Pack 3. As is, that wasn't an option. From a PR standpoint, Vista was so damaged that almost anything would look better. So creating something that is not as bad as Vista is like General Motors improving the Corvair back in the 1960s. It really was a pretty good car in the end, but Ralph Nader's "Unsafe at Any Speed" had damaged the Corvair beyond repair. So from that point of view, having Windows 7 look like Vista and simply saying it's better than Vista may not have been a great idea.

But let's assume that Windows 7 is better than Vista and that Microsoft really has learned and listened. Then you still have the problem that a good number of users will have to upgrade from XP to Windows 7, which so happens to be perhaps Windows 7's most frustrating point. That particularly applies to corporate users where many shops never migrated to Vista at all. It's conceivable that Windows 7, Vista-like though it is, may indeed cause a lot of companies to finally make the migration from XP, but that may mostly be because by now XP is two generations out of date and Microsoft very actively discourages the use of XP.

Only time will tell. It seems almost unthinkable that the world will wholesale reject another Microsoft OS the way Vista as rejected. I mean, a company cannot continue to have 90+% of the market when its new products are rejected. This is why Windows 7 is hugely important to Microsoft. If it's another failure, and the coming weeks and months will tell whether the media enthusiasm will give way to user frustration or not, then, Redmond, we have a problem. If the Vista flop is forgiven like Windows ME was eventually forgiven, Ballmer & Co will likely breathe a huge sigh of relief.

Does it all matter in the rugged space? Not as much as it matters in the consumer and commercial markets. The major players will make sure their product lines are able to run Windows 7 well. And an increasing number may look to Windows Embedded, now that it's called Windows Embedded Standard and "XP" has been banished from the name, though for now it's still really XP (Windows Embedded Standard 2011 will be Windows 7-based).

As expected, Apple is having a field day with the Windows 7 release, running one funny "I'm a PC and I'm a Mac" commercial after another. And just as many would love to have iPhone ease-of-use and functionality on their industrial handhelds, many wish the Mac OS were available on rugged machines. But it's not, and so we truly hope that Windows 7 will give the world a productive and reliable computing platform to work on.

Posted by conradb212 at 07:37 PM | Comments (0)

October 07, 2009

Getac to offer multi-touch on its V100 rugged Tablet PC

Multi-touch has been all the rage ever since Apple showed the world the effortless elegance and utility of the iPhone's two-finger pinch and spread to zoom in and out. So what is multi-touch? Basically, it means the touch screen is able to accept simultaneous input from more than one position. While on the iPhone, multi-touch is currently limited to two fingers, there is theoretically no limit as to the number of simultaneous touches.

What is multi-touch good for? Well, Apple's super-elegant zooming certainly go everyone's attention, but multi-touch can also be used for things like rotating with a two-finger screw in or screw out motion. In addition, multi-touch can be used gestures and the functionality can be built into vertical market custom applications.

While Apple iPhone achieves its multi-touch capability with projected capacitive touch screen technology, that wouldn't work very well in industrial applications where users often wear gloves. For those applications you need a more traditional resistive (pressure-sensitive) touch screen.

There are currently a number of companies working on providing resistive multi-touch systems. Among them are Stantum, Touchco, SiMa Systems, and several others. Some of these products are in the development stage, others are currently available, and each technology is targeted at certain types of applications.

On October 7, 2009, Getac announced that its V100 rugged Tablet PC will offer a multi-touch screen that can be used with or without gloves. According to Getac's press release, this marks a first for rugged computers, and the multi-touch feature will enable users to rotate maps and pictures, zoom in and out of manuals and other documents, move and edit, navigate, and employ a series of special gestures that go beyond what is possible with traditional touch screens that only recognize a single touch.

While the technology used by Getac wasn't mentioned in the press release materials, Getac added an explanatory page to its website (see here). Getac resellers and developers will certainly have an interesting tool to work with.

Posted by conradb212 at 05:54 PM | Comments (0)

Gorilla Glass -- lighter and tougher display protection

On October 6, 2009, Motion Computing announced that their C5 and F5 were the first Tablet PCs to use Corning's Gorilla Glass. What is Gorilla Glass? In its press release, Motion states that it is "thin-sheet glass that was designed to protect against real-world events that cause display damage."

To learn more I scheduled a call with Corning's Dr. Nagaraja Shashidhar. To prepare myself I checked Corning's very informative page on Gorilla Glass. They have some videos there that show the glass being bent and steel balls falling onto it. The glass neither shatters nor breaks. In fact, it's hard to believe it's glass at all. It looks more like a very thin sheet of some polycarbonate plastic or acrylic. But it is glass.

The secret, according to Dr. Shashidhar, lies in a special chemical ion-exchange strengthening process that results in what Corning calls a "compression layer" on the surface of the glass. The primary purpose of that layer is to act as an armor that guards against the nicks and tiny cracks that then result in the glass breaking. And even if there are tiny nicks, the layer keeps them from propagating.

What's amazing is just how thin the glass is. Corning makes it in thicknesses ranging from 0.5mm to 2mm, or 1/50th to 1/12th of an inch. The Gorilla Glass used in the Motion tablets is just 1.2mm thick, yet it provides the protection of a much thicker layer of protective glass at a fraction of the weight. And a thinner layer of protective glass doesn't only mean less weight, it also makes for a more natural feel when using the tablet. With thick glass it sometimes looks like the tip of the pen hovers far above the actual screen. That's not the case with the Gorilla Glass-equipped Motion tablets.

I had actually had some face time with a Motion F5 tablet with the new glass before Motion announced it. I took the opportunity to not only examine the new display, but also benchmark performance and battery life with the new and more powerful processor Motion now uses for the C5 and F5. I also did side-by-side comparisons between an original Motion F5 and the latest model (see full report).

I must admit that it's a bit hard to figure out all the F5's display technologies. You start with a Hydis display that now has AFFS+ technology for not only a totally perfect viewing angle in all directions, but also superior brightness. You then add the Gorilla Glass cover that significantly increases the durability of the display. On top of it all is Motion's View Anywhere, which is an anti-reflective sputtered coating on the front side of the glass that is optically bonded to the display.

How does it work? Extremely well. Between the super-wide viewing angle (which makes for an unbelievably "stable" display) and the excellent sunlight viewability, this is a machine that you can really use outdoors. The Gorilla Glass adds peace of mind (no, I didn't try to break it). And the Gorilla Glass also has another benefit that may turn out to be quite a selling point for Motion: it's nearly immune to smudges. There's nothing worse than a display that's full of grime and fingerprints, and that just doesn't seem to be an issue with Gorilla Glass.

So there. It's a funny name, Gorilla Glass, but it's definitely a good thing. And I am not surprised that Motion is the first to have it on a tablet. They always seem to adopt new stuff first.

Posted by conradb212 at 02:47 AM | Comments (0)

September 10, 2009

Gotcha, fool! Your friends at AT&T

The other day we tested a rugged handheld in the RuggedPCReview.com lab. The device so happened to have a SIM slot because it also worked as a phone and a WWLAN data communicator. I so happen to have an unused phone with a SIM in it, and so I decided to use that SIM for testing the rugged handheld. Why do I have an unused phone? Because it's on one of the AT&T's 2-year service contracts. It's just a crappy throw-away phone, but thanks to AT&T I am now paying for it for another year whether I am using it or not.

So I stick that SIM into the review handheld, make three local calls and load a couple of pages of the RuggedPCReview.com website. Works fine. Take the card out and return it into the unused AT&T phone.

So then I get the bill. That'll be $14.83 for 1,483kb, i.e. loading one or two large webpages. Thank you very much, AT&T. This kind of highway robbery is precisely why I have completely stopped making any call that I am not certain is covered in my "plan." I am not even calling my mom anymore because I have no clue what outrageous amount AT&T may charge me for a call to Europe.

But wait, there's more.

I was on vacation in the Caribbeans for a week. I took my iPhone with me, not because I was going to make a call (heavens no, not with AT&T in an unknown situation!!!), but because the iPhone is a little computer/camera/vidcam/PDA that I take everywhere. Well, apparently six people called my phone while it was in the Caribbeans. I never answered. "That'll be a buck 99 for each call, fool. Haha. Gotcha again. - Your friends at AT&T."

And there AT&T and the other telcos wonder why we loathe them so much.

With voice/data increasingly integrated into rugged handhelds and notebooks, be very careful. That SIM in your machine has "Sucker!!!" written all over it.

Posted by conradb212 at 09:30 PM | Comments (0)

July 30, 2009

Deal killers: The Telco 2-year contracts

Years ago, when some exciting new piece of technology came along I simply could not resist buying it. When the first Newton came out I plunked down seven hundred bucks, just to see how it worked and because I simply had to have one. Likewise when Compaq released the Concerto Tablet PC in the mid-1990s. And when that same Compaq came out with its first iPAQs. I bought one.

You can't do that anymore these days. That's because virtually every piece of technology now includes a phone, and in order to get service you have to sign up for a 2-year contract with the telephone company. Not gonna happen. If I could pick and choose service or just try out a service, I'd probably have a Palm Pre by now, and each of my notebooks and tablets would probably have a wireless card in it. As is, I'd have to sign up for 2-year contracts for each of those devices. Not gonna happen, ever.

So instead of having a Palm Pre and being able to tell friends and anyone out there interested in reading my blogs and articles on what I think about it, I couldn't care less. Am I going to sign with Sprint just to get a Palm Pre? Not gonna happen. Sprint is the company who sent me to collection three times after I cancelled a fully paid and expired contract. Am I going to sign with Verizon or anyone else for TWO YEARS just to get wireless in my notebook? Not gonna happen. Ever.

I know, enough people sign those obnoxious contracts because they see no other option. For those of us who love technology and always had the latest and greatest to write about and take wherever we went, we don't do that anymore. We can't. The telcos' greed has killed it all.

Posted by conradb212 at 10:53 PM | Comments (0)

July 13, 2009

The dangers of product photography

While most of the press either uses official product photography supplied by PR agencies or press centers, or takes quickie snapshots with their smartphones, we here at RuggedPCReview.com do it the hard way. We do our own product photography and always make sure that the devices are shown in the environment they are most likely going to be used in. That isn't always easy.

I was reminded of that as we recently needed to do product photography on a good half dozen of rugged machines. These were rugged and ultra-rugged computers designed to be used on forklifts, in trucks, on bulldozers and other such heavy duty equipment. Well, it so happened that there was a significant construction site nearby where a large number of utility company trucks, dozers, graders and lifts were prepping a parcel of land for who-knows-what. Construction hadn't really started yet, and so the property wasn't fenced in, and all that heavy-duty machinery was just a perfect prop for the product photography I wanted.

So I filled the back of my car with rugged computers, seven in all, and headed for the construction site. For a couple of hours, Carol, our intrepid product photographer, posed the machines on bulldozers, trucks and all sorts of heavy equipment, taking a couple hundred great shots. But we were also sweating bullets as all of a sudden it occurred to us that law enforcement might show up and inquire as to what, exactly, we were doing and where, exactly, all those computers were coming from. The rugged tablets, panels and notebooks we photographed looked like they belonged in the trucks we took pictures of much more than they looked like they belonged to us.

As it turned out, while a few police vehicles drove by, no one stopped and asked what we were doing. And so we didn't have to explain why we were carrying about US$25,000 worth of rugged computers from a construction site into the back of our car. Obviously, we could have explained, but it might have taken an hour or two and perhaps a trip downtown in the back of a police cruiser.

Posted by conradb212 at 09:14 PM | Comments (0)

June 30, 2009

Where rugged computers come from

Where do rugged computers come from? Not always where you think. In an increasingly global marketplace the old business model of companies designing, making, selling and servicing their products is increasingly going by the wayside. These days, it's more likely that one company thinks of a product, hires another to design it, has it built by a third, a forth one is marketing and selling it, and a fifth one does the service. As a result, it's becoming pretty difficult to figure out who does what, and where the computers we buy and use are actually coming from.

For us here at RuggedPCReview.com, this global marketplace often means a good deal of detective work when trying to figure out who actually makes a machine. You could argue that a computer is a computer and it's not really important who designed and manufactured it. That may be so for some, but I really like to know who did the design, who specified the features, and where manufacturing took place. It'd be silly to praise a company for their excellent design when, in fact, all they did was strike a deal with a Chinese manufacturer and put their label on the machine. There's nothing wrong with that, and many companies do a great job searching for good products that they then sell and service in the US. But it'd still be good to know the actual origin and background of a machine.

What are some of the different business models?

• There are resellers that sell machines from other companies.

• There are distributors which carry machines from a variety of sources and often put their own names on the machines.

• There are vendors and system integrators that sell value-added third party machines under their own name. They may or may not have exclusive arrangements with their supplies.

• There are companies that have their own engineering resources and jointly develop machines with Taiwanese or Chinese manufacturers.

• There are companies that design their own machines, but have them built by a Taiwanese or Chinese contract manufacturer.

• And finally, there are those who still design and manufacture their own machines.
  

However, it doesn't end there. Some of the Asian manufacturers have their own relationships and interconnections. As a result, we've seen machines where the top part came from one Asian company and the bottom part from another. We've seen machines seemingly made by Taiwanese manufacturers also being marketed by Chinese companies, apparently under reseller agreements (by and large we assume that machines are made in countries with lower manufacturing costs and marketed or re-sold in countries with higher costs). It can get really confusing.

There are also an awful lot of vendors out there, some of which we never heard from. This morning, for example, I came across Chinese Evoc Group, which has been around since 1993 and makes a large variety of rugged, embedded and industrial computers and components, including some interesting looking panel PCs and rugged notebooks (check the Evoc JNB-1404 and Evoc JNB-1502 rugged notebooks).

Does it even matter where all those computers come from? Probably not to consumers. Whether the Dell or HP notebook at OfficeMax is actually made by Quanta or by Wistron hardly matters (though it really concerns me that apart from CPUs, some other chips and software, almost nothing is made in the US anymore). All those Taiwanese OEMs are top notch, and an increasing number of the Chinese ones as well. It does matter to us, though.

Knowing, and reporting on, all those lesser known Asian OEMs means finding the hidden gems, the companies whose products we'd love to see on the US market. Covering them may lead to OEM deals with US and European companies, and such relationships can be win-win arrangements for all involved. Our feedback may also help them adjust their products for the US and other Western markets that often have different values, priorities and expectations. In that sense, I hope that we at RuggedPCReview.com can be a clearinghouse and conduit of information.

Posted by conradb212 at 07:28 PM | Comments (0)

June 12, 2009

Palm and Windows Mobile and how the iPhone really changed everything

With all the hoopla over the much anticipated release of the Palm Pre in early June of 2009, I thought about the ever-changing fortunes of the mobile platforms in our industry.

Disregarding some smaller players and initiatives, here's the big picture: In 1993, the Apple Newton made news when then Apple CEO John Sculley pushed it hard and predicted that such devices and their infrastructure would one day be a trillion dollar industry. Sculley was scorned for that remark, as was the Newton for its various shortcomings. But the Newton, way ahead of its time, was still good enough to get Microsoft to respond with its own mobile platform, just as a few years prior Microsoft had responded when pen computing with its PenPoint operating system threatened to compete with Windows.

So Windows CE was introduced in 1996, together with a lineup of little clamshells handhelds. The same year, Palm Computing released the little Palm Pilot that no one thought was going to be successful because it neither had a keyboard (considered mandatory after the Newton handwriting recognition fiasco) nor an expansion slot. But much to everyone's surprise, the Palm Pilot took off while Windows CE devices quickly garnered a reputation for being clumsy and underpowered.

Microsoft's approach was to reluctantly add features and gradually allowing more powerful hardware, always concerned that devices might eat into the much more lucrative low-end notebook market, just as they are now worried about netbooks. Microsoft's hardware partners played along and came up with some amazingly innovative devices (yes, you could get a Windows CE-based "netbook" with a 10-inch display and 800 x 600 resolution ten years ago), but even that didn't work against Palm, which sold handhelds by the millions and adeptly crafted a "Palm economy" and thriving developer community that quickly dwarfed Microsoft's tentative and fragmented efforts.

At some point, Microsoft had the chutzpah to steal from Palm by trying to launch a handheld platform called the "Palm PC," but Palm's lawyers quickly nixed that, and their ho-hum handheld PC platform went nowhere. In a last ditch attempt, Microsoft nuked its multiple processor architecture approach around the turn of the millennium and tried again with the "Pocket PC," a markedly improved platform that has survived, in almost unchanged form, to this day.

Palm, in the meantime, thrived and reached a 75% global marketshare. When I gave a keynote presentation at the Taipei International Convention Center in 2001 on the future of pen computing and PDAs, I noted that Palm's OS was aging and Windows CE was gaining market share and might catch Palm within four or five years, but no one really believed that. Yet, it happened in a remarkable, unlikely succession of events that saw Palm fumble its leading position away and sink into virtual irrelevance while Microsoft, hardly more adept with its own mobile efforts repositioned Windows CE as, essentially, an embedded platform for the vertical market.

That approach, while it made sense, wasn't actually one that I thought was automatically going to be successful. In the late 1990s, Symbol Technologies, now part of Motorola, had been one of the first to adopt non-proprietary operating systems into its products. At some point, they offered both a Palm OS product and a very similar one powered by Windows CE, and at the time we were told that the Palm device did far better. Yet, Symbol was one of the very few vertical market companies that chose Palm, whereas Microsoft was remarkably successful in quietly positioning Windows CE as sort of a low-cost subset of Windows that would leverage corporate IT expertise and investments.

So while a lot of people wondered why Microsoft couldn't do any better in the mobile space, it was probably because they didn't want to. In 2002 I reviewed the T-Mobile Pocket PC Phone, an early smartphone that was amazingly good and would still fit right into the smartphone landscape of today, both in terms of looks and performance. Yet, not much happened after that. HP pretty much gambled away the "iPAQ" brand that came into its possession when they took over Compaq. Taiwanese and Korean companies became the new driving force, with the likes of HTC and Samsung settings trends and directions. And somehow the notion took hold that every handheld had to be a phone, which, in the US at least, meant being forced into overpriced 2-year contracts with telcos that couldn't care less about anything other than profit.

The reason why Windows CE became so successful is not because it's so good. It's a nice workmanlike effort, to be sure, but it's clumsy, sluggish and about as agile as a riverboat. But it only took over because a) the proprietary computing platforms of earlier handhelds were no longer acceptable, b) Palm let it by self-destructing, and c) because IT uses Windows and Windows CE sort of fits in. So there. It works, but it's ugly, really ugly.

It took Apple with the iPhone to demonstrate just how ugly Windows CE was. Unlike the Newton, the iPhone was right from the start, and it totally redefined how a mobile device should work. Its effortless elegance is exactly what people want, and Apple made it look natural and easy. The iPhone is human interface engineering at its very best. It may not meet all the IT-mandated checkmarks (yet) and thus earned the stern finger-wagging from some corporate types, but even they probably have an iPhone in their pockets. Once you know how simply and beautifully things can work, you never want to go back.

In a sense it's deja-vue all over again. Apple has a better product and a better idea, but Microsoft still dominates the desktop. Palm, back from the pretty-much-dead, tries again with a slick little box, just like the Palm Pilot once was, only this time they're copying Apple. The question in my mind is how long even workers and industrial users are willing to put up with klutzy, clumsy Windows CE now that almost everyone knows how well handheld electronics can work.

Posted by conradb212 at 04:27 PM | Comments (0)

April 10, 2009

Atom platform expands, but does it have a clear direction?

In the days of the 386, 486 and even early Pentium processors, it used to be fairly easy to follow Intel's chips as they mainly differed in clock speed. These days, staying on top of Intel's various offerings has become an almost full time job. That even goes for Intel's low-end Atom chips that, together with resurrecting some older Intel technologies such as hyperthreading, seemed to simplify the matter of processor selection. It didn't really turn out that way. Intel has been very successful in positioning the Atom processor as new, exciting, efficient and just generally the way to go, but it's really not that simple.

For example, "Atom" has from the start referred to two very different processor families.

The initial generation of Atom processor was the Z5X0 that was codenamed "Silverthorne" with a tiny 13 x 14 mm package footprint. They were targeted at mobile internet devices (MIDs) and used the also entirely new "Poulsbo" System Controller Hub. The processor has about 47 million transistors, which is more than the Pentium 4 had. Bus frequency is 400 or 533MHz (which support Intel's HyperThreading). Thermal Design Power is between 0.85 watts for a low-end 800MHz version without HyperThreading, and 2.65 watts for a 1.86GHz verison with HyperThreading. The chipset uses about 2.3 watts, which means total CPU and chipset consumption isn't even 5 watts. And the chipset has hardware support for H.264 and other HD decoding. However, as a the combo is targeted for internet devices, there is PATA but no SATA support.

A second family of Atom processors, the N2X0 that was codenamed "Diamondville," was meant for standard low-cost PCs and netbook type of devices. The N2X0 is similar in many ways to the 5XX platform, but used a somewhat larger 22 x 22 mm package. The N270 has a TDP of 2 watts and costs less than US$44, the same speed N230 4 watts and US$29. As of now, the N2X0 processor generally uses a version of the older i945 chipset. In order to reduce its power consumption down to 5.5 watts, its frequency (and performance) have been lowered as well and the chipset is called the i945GSE. This is used in the N270. The N230 chip, geared towards desktops, uses the i945GC that is quicker, but also uses 18 watts! Note that the i945's GMA 950 IGP is not able to decode HD signals. The N2X0 can be used with SiS chipsets. though I haven't seen any such systems.

From the looks of it, system designers have been struggling in figuring out whether to use the Z5xx or the N2xx chip. In netbooks it was a slamdunk for Diamondville as almost all netbooks use the 1.6GHz N270. However, there are exceptions. When Panasonic introduced its Toughbook CF-H1 Mobile Clinical Assistant, it came with the 1.86GHz Atom Z540 processor. And when Samwell, one of Taiwan's major OEMs in the semi-rugged and rugged space, introduced what is essentially a rugged tablet version of a netbook, they also picked a "Silverthorne" processor, in this case the Z530P.

I am not sure what drives the decision to go with a Atom N270 versus a Atom Z530. On the surface, they seem to have about the same performance and use about the same amount of power. One glaring difference in their specification is that the N2XX series supports the ever-important SATA (serial ATA) disk interface whereas the Z5XX does not and needs to use PATA drives. On the other hand, the technically inclined point out that the N2XX's use of a very slow version of the already dated i945 chipset makes for sluggish graphics performance and that the i945's GMA 950 IGP is not able to decode HD signals. Anyone who has tried playing back high-def video on a N270-based netbooks knows the pain. However, both versions of the Atom score about the same on the two benchmark systems we use here at RuggedPCReview (PassMark 6.1 and CrystalMark 2004). The Z5xx, in fact, scored very low in 3D graphics, which one would assume are at least somewhat of importance in any "mobile internet device."

But things are getting more interesting yet. Despite what on the surface appears to be the more lucrative "Diamondville" market with its many millions of N270 chips, on April 8, 2009, Intel announced the expansion of the Z5xx platform with a new high-end version, the 2GHz Z515, and a new gas miser version, the "up-to-1.2GHz" Z515. At the same time, Intel spoke of an entirely new Atom platform called "Moorestown" that combines the "Lincroft" system-on-chip with the "Langwell" hub of which as of now all I know is that it uses a lot of acronyms and is still based on the 45nm manufacturing technology.

On the N2xx horizon, there is the N280 processor, and apparently also a dual core Atom chip. There is not much material out there on those, and I need to look more into it.

There was another development. For embedded computing Intel quietly expanded the Z5XX platform with larger form factor versions that carry a "P" in their name, and then special "large form factor with industrial temperature options" versions marked with a "PT." I was aware that Intel would release a "large package" version of the Atom, but not the timing and the purpose. Well, this happened in March of 2009 when Intel added the "large form factor" Atom 1.1GHz Z510P and 1.6GHz Z530P as well as the "large form factor with industrial temperature option" 1.1GHz Z510PT and 1.33GHz Z520PT. What does that mean? In essence, the P and PT versions look like larger chips. Instead of the tiny 13x14mm package of the original Z5xx chips, they use a 22x22mm package, which is actually the same size as the N2xx chips. As far as temperature range goes, 0 to 70 degrees Celsius (32 to 158 degrees Fahrenheit) is considered "commercial," whereas -40 to 85 degrees Celsius (-40 to 185 degrees Fahrenheit) is considered "industrial." Interestingly, only the "PT" series processors support the industrial temperature range; the "P" series versions are listed with the same commercial temperature range as the initial chips.

Intel's updated Z5xx product brief now stresses fairly strongly that there are industrial as well as commercal temperature range packages for both the Z5xx processors as well as for their complementing US15W system controller hubs (GMA 500 graphics, I/O controller and memory controller). The brief also stresses that the small footprint versions are for space-constrained handheld and embedded devices whereas the large form factor is pitched for designs without small space restrictions but industrial temperature requirements. So why then do the "P" processors still have the same commercial temperature rating? Probably because the large package also includes "an integrated heat spreader" that "further contributes to its value for thermally constrained, fanless applications." Since the thermal design power of these chips was already tiny, I am not sure what the integrated heat spreader does, or why it was necessary.

In terms of performance, the "P" large form factor and "PT" large form factor/industrial temperature range chips appear unchanged, though the TDP is up a bit from 2.0 to 2.2 watts. However, if you compare the Intel's summary sheets for the Z530 and the Z530P it looks like the 530P chip is missing Intel Virtualization Technology as well as Demand Based Switching. Virtualization technology, according to Intel, allows "consolidating multiple environments into a single server or PC" which I believe means the CPU acts as if it were multiple CPUs operating independently so you can run different operating systems at the same time. Demand Based Switching was described as an enhanced version of Intel's SpeedStep technology (see description) that is available in both versions of the Z530. These are generally fairly involved server-based issues and I am not sure what the relevance to the new "large package" Atom processors is.

In any case, the "large package" also has a different "ball pitch," which refers to the spacing of the little balls of solder that replace pins on the underside of these tiny processor packages. From what I can tell, the 0.6mm ball pitch of the original Z5xx series requires high density interconnects (HDI) on the printed circuit boards, and those are more difficult to do and also more finicky--not what one would want in a rugged product (for an example of these issues, read this). So the "P" series would address that issue with its larger package size whereas the "PT" series would appeal to automotive and other transportation and industrial applications that often have a -40 to 185 degrees Fahrenheit requirement.

Now add to this that Atom chips, despite all the hoopla and market acceptance, are pretty poor performers, benchmarking no better than the lowly original Core Solos. Graphics performance, especially, is weak (what's considered weak in one device can be more than adequate in another, of course). There's the low power consumption, of course, but even that is not a given. We've benchmarked exceedingly thrifty Core 2 Duo machines as well as power-guzzling Atom systems, so proper setup and configuration are an issue.

Sometimes it almost seems like the Atom is sort of a trial balloon, one where Intel very successfully created an attractive image of a hip processor, but is also somewhat aimlessly trying out various applications to see where the Atom will fit and stick.

Posted by conradb212 at 02:20 PM | Comments (0)

January 15, 2009

The Intel Atom processor phenomenon

Frustrated with the small display and insufficient battery life of your mobile or handheld computer? Is it also too big and just not quick enough? And you can't stand a fan coming on and the thing getting so hot you can barely touch it? Welcome to the world of mobile computing where optimizing mutually exclusive goals is the order of the day. As a result, manufacturers of mobile gear are fighting a never-ending struggle to find the best compromise -- and it is always a compromise -- between size, weight, usability, performance and battery life. The screen should be large enough to be useful. Size and weight should be such as to render the device as mobile as possible. Performance should at least be adequate. And the battery must last long enough to get the job done. Long battery life either means a big battery or a device that doesn't use much power, and the latter is often preferable. Displays use a lot of power, especially with the backlight up high, but you simply need to see what you're doing and so display size may be a given.

Which gets us to the processor. There was a time when processors cost next to nothing and the mere thought of needing to cool them with a big fan would have been preposterous. When I bought my first IBM PC in 1981, it cost US$4,000, in 1981 dollars. It was powered by a 4.77MHz Intel 8088 processor that you could be at any electronics store for about six dollars (the folks who proclaim that ALL electronics components have become so much cheaper obviously weren't around in 1981). Intel managed to parlay the processor business into a near monopoly, with Microsoft and Intel going lock-step in a mutually advantageous game of creating ever more resource intensive software. Microsoft made Windows bigger and bigger, and Intel delivered the processors needed to run it. That's what got us to a point where software needs minutes to boot, and the processor, chipset and graphics card all need big fans for cooling. Oh, and while the cost of computers has come way down, the cost of Intel processors has gone way, way up. A big new one can cost a thousand dollars, and even more modest ones approach the cost of low-end notebooks. A halfway decent Core 2 Duo costs more than a little Acer Aspire One netbook.

How can Acer, and everyone else who makes small, inexpensive computers do it? Increasingly by using the Intel Atom processor, which is smaller, uses less power, and costs relatively little. Why did Intel do it? Because they found themselves in a predicament. Microsoft increasingly insists that every computer must run Windows proper. The 1990s experiment with Pocket PCs is essentially over. By insisting that small platforms had to be compatible with Windows, yet making sure they didn't get powerful enough to be a threat to the Windows business, Microsoft successfully kept the wings of mobile devices clipped, to the extent where they eventually disappeared as viable platforms. Just the other day I came across a press release from a major manufacturer of rugged handheld computers that said its customers increasingly demanded full Windows even on handheld devices. And that gets us right back to the Atom processor.

Now cost isn't as much of a factor in the vertical marketplace as it is in the consumer market. I am not saying cost doesn't matter, but a market where a device may cost US$4,000 has a bit more leeway than one where customers expect US$800 pricing. What does matter, though, is size, weight and battery life. So what Intel did with the Atom processors is essentially remove the processor as a major power consumption factor. What do I mean by that? Well, an average Core 2 Duo desktop processor uses around 65 watts, a mobile version about 35 watts. There are chips that use considerably more or a bit less, but those are the rough numbers.

Now how do we know how much power a processor uses? After all, Intel sells them using a weird nomenclature that, unlike light bulbs that have a watt rating, seems unrelated to performance. Instead, Intel usually provides what they call the "Thermal Design Power," or TDP. TDP is described as "The maximum amount of heat which a thermal solution must be able to dissipate from the processor so that the processor will operate under normal operating conditions." There's a good deal of debate as to what TDP actually means and how it relates to real world power consumption of a processor. But for the sake of the argument, let's assume we're talking watt-hours and the processor is in a battery-powered computer. We can easily compute the battery's watt-hours by multiplying volt and amp ratings. A powerful notebook computer battery may provide 75 watt-hour, just enough to run a typical desktop processor for an hour (and that's without the power needed for the display and everything else in the notebook). A frugal notebook processor with a TDP of 25 watts would run three hours, and that sounds about right (in the real world, the processor uses power conservation modes most of the time, but you have to add in the power used by all the other computer components).

Now what does an Atom processor use? Between 0.6 and 4 watts. There are two different families of Atom chips, one geared towards mobile Internet devices (MIDs) and one towards netbooks and other low-cost PCs. The most popular chip in mobile computing is probably the 1.6GHz Atom N270, which has a TDP of 2.5 watts. That's the chip you find in almost all current (early 2009) netbooks and in many embedded components. Why two families? Because MIDs and PCs have different feature requirements. MIDs are usually multimedia-oriented and power consumption is totally crucial because the devices are so small. Netbooks and similar generally rely more on compatibility and standard PC interfaces (like SATA).

So where do the Atom processors fit in as far as power consumption goes? Well, 2.5 watts is sensationally low compared to just about anything else available. The generally unloved Intel Core Solo uses about 5.5 watts in its ultra-low power version (U1300/1400/1500), the Core 2 Solo (U2100/2200) about the same, the mobile Core 2 Duos between 10 watts (U7500) and 45 watts (Q9100/9300). So the most popular Atom processor uses less than half the power of a Core Solo and only a small fraction of that of the Core 2 Duo chips.

Now keep in mind that processors need corresponding chipsets, and those use power, too. Intel designed a super-efficient chipset to go with the MID-oriented Z5xx series of Atom chips that was once codenamed Silverthorne. That chipset, the "Poulsbo System Controller Hub," can do high definition video decoding and other neat stuff required in consumer multimedia devices, and it only uses about 2.3 watts. However, it does not support serial ATA and some other essentials, which rules it out for many computing applications. The N2x0 series of Atom chips uses the i945GSE, which is a slowed-down version of an older Intel chipset, the i945. That's good as far as compatibility goes, but there is no high-def decoding and 3D performance is low. The i945GSE uses about 5.5 watts, so overall consumption of the N270 and the chipset is still only about 8 watts, but it's not exactly a state-of-the-art solution.

How about performance? This is where it gets a bit complicated because overall "performance" of a computer depends not only on the CPU, but also the chipset, the memory, the hard disk or SSD, overall system configuration and -- very important -- the OS platform and software loaded. That said, we run fairly extensive benchmarks on all systems that come to our lab, and so far we've found that an average Atom N270 device scores roughly one third of that of a 2.5GHz Core 2 Duo T9400, about 30% less than that of a 1.2GHz Core Duo U2500, about the same as a 1.2GHz Intel Core Solo U1400, and about 50% better than that of a 1GHz Celeron M 373. So we're talking decent, but certainly not blazing speed.

As far as architecture goes, the Atom is an interesting mix of old and new technologies. It's definitely state-of-the=art in terms of miniaturization, using Intel's hafnium-based high-k manufacturing. That is a fancy terminology describing the use of different conductor materials to make even tinier transistors possible. The architecture of the chips is less advanced. There's only a single core, though Intel uses the old HyperThreading technology known from as far back as the Pentium 4. There are also advanced new power savings technologies.

Overall, the Atom is certainly an interesting marketing phenomenon. At this point, everyone is clambering to get onboard the Atom bandwagon, and somehow Intel managed to stay clear of the nuclear power connotation though one would expect that from a name like "Atom." Intel, though, stresses the hafnium-based manufacturing process, and hafnium's primary use is in control rods in nuclear power plants, so that may be the "Atom" connection. In any case, even with the sub-optimal chipset situation, the lack of some features, and only moderate performance, Atom is hot. And in the new Intel world order of massively expensive processors, Atom is cheap, too, with prices of well under US$100 depending on the type and version. I've seen $44 for the N270 mentioned, and about the same for some of the low-end Z5x0 chips plus their Poulsbo chipset. Oh, and if you wonder what the difference is between the N270 and the 230, there is a N270 and a 230 that run at the same speed, the N270 is for mobile applications whereas the 230 uses a bit more power (4 watts) and is used with a considerably more power-hungry version of the of the i945 chipset, making the Atom 230 more suitable for desktop use.

As usual, there are numerous expert opinions out there, and the overall consensus seems to be that, for now, the Atoms just represent Intel's first step into the small form factor embedded and a MID market that is pretty much dominated by ARM-based designs.

With Intel's resources and marketing savvy, Atom as a "low power" processor platform may well be here to stay. As is, they are off to an amazingly good start.

For much more information on the Silverthorne platform, check Intel's Intel Atom processor Z5xx Series.

Posted by conradb212 at 04:42 PM | Comments (0)

January 05, 2009

The amazing success of "netbooks"

These days, "netbooks" get a lot of press. You' think a "netbook" were some sort of miraculous new device, a technological breakthrough that lets you do new and wondrous things. In fact, "netbooks" are nothing more than little notebooks. There is absolutely nothing new or exciting about them. And there is nothing that makes them earn the "netbook" name.

Nor are they new. There have been numerous attempts at selling downsized miniature laptops over the years, going back to the early 1990s and before. None were ever successful. People simply did not want an underpowered mini version of a notebook with a small screen and a keyboard that was not full size. Apparently that's changed and "netbooks" sell by the millions. Go figure.

One difference perhaps is that technology has come a long way. Even an underpowered mini notebook can do just about anything anyone would ever need in terms of computing. Standard wordprocessing, scheduling, spreadsheets, presentations, email and internet access tasks can all be done on a mini notebook. Let's take a look at what "netbooks" offer:

For the most part they are clamshells measuring about 10 x 6.5 inches and weighing between two and three pounds. They have displays measuring between 7 and 10 inches diagonally and they usually offer WSVGA resolution, which means 1024 x 600 pixels. Their keyboards are usually around 90%-scale, which is infuriating because that makes touch-typing a pain and also because there'd actually be enough room for a full QWERTY layout by making punctuation keys smaller, but apparently Taiwanese and Chinese ODMs and OEMS do not realize that. Memory is usually limited to a gigabyte, though some can be expanded to a gig and a half. Storage is either via Flash for Linux-based netbooks or generously-sized hard disk for Windows-based units. Most come with a rudimentary onboard cam, SD card or multi-card slots and, of course, Bluetooth and WiFi. And most are powered by Atom chips, generally the 1.6GHz N270.

How do they work? It depends on your expectations. Benchmark performance is about a third of that of a modern notebook, so routine stuff can take much longer than you're used to. The biggest limitation is the small screen. My Acer Aspire One, one of the most popular netbooks, has a 8.9-inch screen which is bright and sharp, but 1024 x 600 pixels simply isn't enough for anything these days. Working with it becomes a continuous for screen real estate, which means turning off unneeded toolbars and a lot of scrolling, scrolling, scrolling. The term "netbook" is also a total misnomer as the one thing where the current generation of netbooks falls way behind is fast web access. Pages take forever to load.

If they are such a pain to use, why do I have a netbook? Because they have a lot going for themselves, too. My Acer One runs Windows XP speedily on 1.5GB of RAM, and the 160GB hard disk is both quick and large enough. With its 6-cell battery the little Acer can run as long as six hours on a charge, and sometimes more. I like its dual SD card slots. I occasionally miss an optical drive, but have my office network set up so I can access the DVD drive of a desktop. Most of all, I like the Acer's small and handy size. Packing and transporting even a compact notebook is usually a pain, but the little Acer netbook fits absolutely anywhere. Even its power supply is tiny. In my office, I hook it up to a 20-inch LCD and a full-size keyboard and mouse. I get full 1600 x 1200 pixel resolution, which makes working on the little Acer feel like working on a "real" computer.

So, "netbooks" they are not. But there does seem to be a good-size niche for surprisingly competent little notebooks that go for less than US$400. Price is definitely an issue. I'd rather have a more rugged device with a touch screen. Fujitsu and Panasonic and others make them, but for several times the money. Why not a rugged netbook with a very small price? It might sell in large quantities.

Posted by conradb212 at 05:29 PM | Comments (0)

December 19, 2008

The problem with Linux

On the surface, Linux should be a huge winner, and in many respects it is. Hey, what more can one want than a free operating system with mostly free software that runs on just about anything? I've been using Linux for many years for just that reason. Free. No hassles with activation, copy protection, and other pesky schemes meant to keep pirates away yet only inconveniencing customers.

So why hasn't Linux taken over? Because it's too complex. Sure, there are distributions that install simply and easily, but you can also spend hours trying to get one little thing to work right. Linux is a giant patchwork of code from all over the world. Perhaps the biggest challenge is that almost all Linux developers think Linux is so simple that absolutely everyone should be able to perform arcane steps and procedures.

Linux suffers from the expert syndrome. The expert syndrome is what makes academics speak in nearly incomprehensible language. It makes them look and sound important and, in their minds, is a reflection of their superior intellect and knowledge. Coders, likewise, revel in acting as if their most complex systems were child's play and anyone who does not master it must be an idiot. Some of the instructions for Linux are so complex and incomplete as to make it impossible for anyone who does not already know the systems to install things or make them work.

In all my time of working with Linux I've found perhaps a handful of truly useful tutorials and instructions. Sadly, this pits an incredibly productive global community of Linux coders and developers squarely at odds with the rest of humanity who can no more compile a kernel than split an atom. The rest of humanity also does not appreciate being talked down to when it comes to doing simple things like properly extracting a file, making a wireless connection work, or numerous other things that should be simple and self-explanatory but, in Linux, are not.

Unfortunately, I do not see a solution to this problem. You either have tightly controlled empires like Microsoft or Apple where things are centrally controlled and packaged, or you have loosely knit global communities of techies with all their human brilliance and flaws. So things will likely continue the way they have for decades, with Linux being both a a terrific solution but also one that can be endlessly frustrating.

Posted by conradb212 at 04:32 PM | Comments (0)

November 21, 2008

Smartphone & Pocket PC Magazine -- the shortsightedness of letting an incredible resource die

With Microsoft sitting on billions of dollars in cash and spending many millions on comedian Jerry Seinfeld and a silly Vista campaign, the one magazine that has covered Pocket PCs and Windows Mobile for many years has just died due to lack of support. I am talking about Smartphone & Pocket PC Magazine, published by Thaddeus Computing Inc. Those guys were publishing magazines on small Microsoft-powered computers for almost a quarter of a century, yet neither Microsoft nor Hewlett Packard apparently cares enough about real, quality coverage of their products to at least use this incredible magazine as a venue for advertising, let alone as the important, invaluable partner in spreading the word about handheld computers that they are (and now were).

Having founded and run several print magazines myself, I know all about the work and hardship that goes into creating a quality magazine, and how things are all different in this age and day of the Internet and web. Advertising dollars are increasingly going away from print, and people no longer want to wait for information to appear in print. Everything is available instantly. Yet, the information on the web is .... different. In a way it almost does not compete with print. How else would one explain the fact that there appear to be more magazines on newsstands than ever? I myself absolutely cannot imagine life without computers and the web, yet I have a good dozen print magazine subscriptions that I never intend to give up. Magazines and the web are as different as radio and TV -- both convey information and entertain, but in different ways. Unfortunately, tech companies like Microsoft do not seem to understand that, and the phone companies who have taken over the smartphone business are clueless about the market that has fallen into their laps.

Fact is, online is becoming much like TV -- far too many channels and nothing to watch. It's all commercials and infomercials. You have to channel-flip not because you can, but because you're constantly avoiding commercials and seeking something, anything, meaningful to watch. And quality is getting lost in a vast sea of drivel. You can google a particular product and instantly get 10,000 references to it, mostly junk. By now the web is jam-packed with virtually content-free sites that are just landing pages for ads and more ads. Even reputable sites are doing it: two paragraphs of content and then commercial bombardment. The ever more popular "customer reviews" are often little more than "this product sucks!", "no, this product is the best ever" slugfests, and the same goes for bulletin boards where there is endless posting and almost no factual information. With the exception of the by now almost suffocating commercialization it's all worth it, of course. But it is NOT a replacement for a good print magazine.

When I look at the final copy of Smartphone & Pocket PC Magazine (the Smartphone & Pocket PC Super Resource Guide Dec/Jan 2009) I see a hundred pages of superb, comprehensive information, a reference guide I am certain to keep around for years. You'd have to visit literally thousands of websites to get that amount of good information, and even then you would not get the quality. A complete and total spec list of ALL smartphones with touch screens? Check. A complete and total spec list of ALL PDAs? Check. Reviews and ratings of hundreds of the best software apps? Check. A complete analysis of GPS on Windows Mobile, including product reviews and comprehensive comparison charts? Check. Detailed reviews of the leading and upcoming smartphone platforms? Check. And that is just a small part of it. If a consultant were given the task of compiling the huge wealth of information contained in just one issue of Smartphone & Pocket PC Magazine, it'd cost many tens of thousands of dollars, and probably hundreds of thousands. For a company like Microsoft to let such an incredible resource die -- a resource that does nothing but promote Microsoft's mobile embedded platform -- is simply unimaginable. Spending millions on nonsensical commercials and sitting on billions, yet not support real, quality, serious information, it just does not compute. The cost of supporting a resource like Smartphone & Pocket PC Magazine that provides real information is absolutely minuscule compared to the billion here, billion there mentality of big business.

Lacking any meaningful support from the Windows Mobile side of things, Thaddeus Computing is now going on to cover the iPhone platform with their new iPhone Life magazine. It'll be an uphill battle as now they'll be dealing with one single hardware and software vendor (Apple), one single service provider (AT&T), and application software vendors who do all of their selling through Apple's App Store, so the impact of print advertising will be less traceable than ever. The iPhone is hugely popular, of course, but neither will people buy another iPhone (they're locked into a 2-year contract) nor can they buy another model (there's only one). The phone companies have historically not supported enthusiast magazines and there is no indication they ever will. They also don't "get it," something at least the Microsoft field people certainly did.

But won't Apple be thrilled to see one of the most respected niche and enthusiast publishers switch allegiance? Likely not, if they even notice. Apple is sitting on its own billions of cash, but I am fairly certain none of it will go to supporting a small magazine that could spread high quality news and real information at an annual cost that's a tiny fraction of the interest on Apple's cash reserves alone. And AT&T, which in the U.S. has a service monopoly on the iPhone? Hah.

So best of luck to the folks at Thaddeus Computing. It's an absolute crying shame to see Smartphone & Pocket PC Magazine die, and those in the Windows Mobile industry who let that happen deserve to be accused of colossal, inexcusable shortsightedness. Maybe someone will come to their senses and buy Thaddeus. 25 years of experience and commanding knowledge of the major serious mobile platform in the world AND they know how to compile and present information AND they have all the magazine distribution channels in place AND running them for a year probably costs peanuts? No brainer if you ask me.

Posted by conradb212 at 03:27 PM | Comments (0)

November 18, 2008

Thoughts about ingress protection: eliminate potential points of failure

The most commonly used measure for protection against the elements is the IP rating, or Ingress Protection rating. The IP rating consists of two numbers where the first indicates protection against solids and the second protection against liquids. Solid ratings go from 1 to 6, with 6 meaning the best protection. Liquid ratings go from 1 to 8, with 8 meaning the highest protection. Essentially, the purpose of these ratings are the determination of how well a device can keep out dust and water. As far as liquids go, the purpose of the rating is not to signify waterproofing for underwater operation (though IP68 means a device is indeed waterproof) but how well a piece of equipment can keep out water during normal operation in the field. What could happen, for example, is that a device gets exposed to rain, or even strong driving rain during a storm. In a marine setting it is possible for a device to suddenly become exposed to heavy seas, and it may need to be protected against that.

All of this needs to be tested and certified, and the way it is usually done is by following standard procedures that describe a controlled lab testing setup, like document 60529 issued by the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC).

The problem is that lab tests do not always accurately predict what may happen in real life. In that respect the ratings should really be considered guidelines rather than hard data. Consider, for example, two devices that both carry an IP67 rating. One of them has no external ports other than a single surface mount connector used to provide interfacing via a port replicator or dock. The other has a variety of commonly used ports, all protected by individual rubber plugs. One machine may also have an externally accessible expansion slot and an easily replaceable battery, each nicely sealed via o-rings and other high quality seals. Which device do you think is more at risk for leaking?

I'd say the second as it has multiple areas of entry as opposed to just one. No matter how well engineered the device may be, the probability of something going wrong is higher. A protective cover may not be pushed in all the way. A seal may have shrunk or gotten broken. A door was inadvertantly left open. It can happen.

A compromised seal may not necessarily mean a leak into the inside of the device. The port itself may carry enough sealing in addition to the protection provided by its cover to ward off damage. Then again, it may not. Bottomline is that the simplest and most foolproof protection is best.

Anything mission-critical should be failsafe. Failsafe means that if a system fails, it must fail in its safe state. A relay that snaps closed when it loses power is an example. The problem with protective rubber and other seals I'd that none are fail-safe. They are all fail-fail. So the best way to proceed is to have as few potential points of failure as possible.

What that means is that, all else being equal, a device with fewer possible points of failure will almost always be a better choice as far as protection us concerned.

Posted by conradb212 at 11:12 PM | Comments (0)

November 10, 2008

Benchmarking popular mobile Intel processors

Well, we finally managed to benchmark a mobile device with an Atom processor. Like everyone else, I was wondering where Atom performance fits in. The Thermal Design Power (TDP) of the 45nm Atom processors is so ridiculously low that it's impossible to even make an educated guess. There are, of course, a number of different Atom processors out there, but one that appears to be popular in small mobile devices is the Atom N270.

The N270 is a single-core processor that runs at 1.6GHz and has a TDP of 2.5 watts -- significantly less than even an ultra-low voltage Intel Core Solo and only a small fraction of the power consumption of your average consumer notebook. There are other system parts that use power, and for now Intel doesn't offer Atom-compatible chipsets that are nearly as miserly as the processor itself. Further, a lot of the advanced features we've come to take for granted in Intel Core processors are simply not part of the Atom. Instead, Intel resorted to the hyper-threading technology from its past. It's all quite complex and it probably takes a chip design experts to tell how various Intel technologies impact performance.

What we can do is run benchmarks, and that's what we did on an Atom N270-powered Acer Aspire One netbook, an exceedingly handy little clamshell computer with an WXGA 8.9-inch display and a weight of just over two pounds. The tiny Acer came with a gigabyte of RAM, a 160GB 5400rpm disk, and ran Windows XP. Our standard benchmark suite, PassMark, did not complete and so we switched to CrystalMark 2004R2. Here are the results:

PERFORMANCE COMPARISON	Intel A110	Core Solo U1400	Atom N270	Core Duo U2500
Clock speed	800MHz	1.2GHz	1.6GHz	1.2GHz
Test Unit	GETAC E100	Motion F5	Acer One	Xplore 104C4
Thermal Design Power (TDP)	3.0 watts	5.5 watts	2.5 watts	10.0 watts
ALU	3026	4565	5544	9291
FPU	3682	5343	5370	11124
MEM	2732	4989	4442	6132
HDD	3614	3252	7900	6381
GDI	3040	4239	3293	3987
D2D	2530	4221	2912	3899
OGL	738	1151	684	1187
Overall CrystalMark	19362	27760	30145	42001

These figures suggest that systems equipped with the Atom N270 are quite a bit quicker than machines with the Atom's predecessor chip, the A110, but only a bit faster than the first-gen Intel Core Solo. The 1.6GHz Atom N270 is no match for the 1.2GHz Core Duo U2500 that's used in a number of high-performance Tablet PC slates. The high clock speed of the single core N270 is therefore a bit misleading. Clock cycle for clock cycle, the unloved Core Solo is more powerful.

However, in a lean, smartly designed system with enough RAM and a speedy disk, such as the Acer One netbook, the N270 can deliver both power and economy. The Acer feels fairly quick, and it runs about 2-1/2 to three hours on a small 24 watt-hour 3-cell battery and 5-1/2 to six hours on a 49 watt-hour 6-cell battery.

Posted by conradb212 at 09:59 PM | Comments (0)

October 15, 2008

Ultra-rugged waterproof displays

In RuggedPCReview we usually cover mobile computers, i.e. systems that combine processing, storage, data input and display all in one unit. That, however, doesn't mean that all mobile systems are all-in-one type of devices. Tablets and slates, for example, are often used in conjunction with an external display and full-size keyboard when used in a stationary environment, and there really is no compelling need for vehicle and panel mount systems to be all-in-one.

I was reminded of that when I came across some very interesting display products from a company called Digital Systems Engineering, located in Scottsdale, Arizona. They have the DVE Raptor display where DVE stands for "Driver Vision Enhancement." It is a ruggedized LCD display designed to operate under the kind of extreme environmental conditions encountered in tactical wheeled and tracked vehicles. The 10.4-inch SVGA display is sunlight readable with a super-strong 1,000 nits backlight (standard notebooks have less than 200 nits), good vertical an horizontal viewing angles, and zero color shift.

What's most amazing, though, is the Raptor display's environmental specs. It carries an IP67 rating, which means it is not only totally sealed against dust, but it is also waterproof to the extent where it is submersible. Hopefully that won't happen in a tactical vehicle, but this display will continue to operate under water. It can also operate in an extremely wide temperature range of -40 to 158 degrees Fahrenheit, handle any degree of humidity, and operate at 45,000 feet of altitude. Needless to say, the milled aluminum and heavily sealed and protected display has been shock and vibration tested to MIL-STD-810F specs.

The screen, which only weighs a bit over eight pounds, is also MIL-STD-3009 compliant. MIL-STD-3009 (also referenced as DOD-STD-3009) sets requirements for aircraft display equipment for use with night vision imaging systems. For mobile computers that generally means they must not interfere with night vision equipment in a cockpit. Part of this document is the U.S. Navy MIL-HDBK-87213 Revision A (Electronically/Optically Generated Airborne Displays) that describes, among other, criteria for legibility of electro-optical display equipment and daylight readability in bright environments, which is a military requirement. This can be an issue with daylight readable displays marketed to the govenment and armed forces.

If the indestructible Raptor is overkill, Digital Systems Engineering has a line of MSM monitors where MSM stands for Mil Spec Monitor. These come in various display sizes (8, 10, 12, 15) and are lighter than the Raptor. Despite IP67 sealing, they only weigh between 3.5 (8.4-inch display) and 6.9 pounds (15 inch display). Yet, the MSMs are MIL-STD-3009, MIL-L-85762A and MIL-PRF-22885 compliant and have an incredibly bright 1,400 nit backlight in addition to anti-reflective and anti-glare surface treatment, making them viewable under any lighting conditions.

To learn more about those super-rugged monitors, check Digital Systems Engineering's website at http://www.digitalsys.com.

Posted by conradb212 at 04:18 PM | Comments (0)

September 30, 2008

Why is no one using the Marvell speedy and powerful PXA320?

When we reviewed the TDS/Trimble Nomad last year here at RuggedPCReview.com, I marveled over the machine and noted, "The 800 MHz Marvell PXA320 processor certainly had something to do with it. The difference between it and the 624MHz PXA270 is much larger than we expected."

In fact, the chip performed so well in the Nomad that I was certain other manufacturers would quickly follow suit and use the formidable PXA320 chip as well. Interestingly, that didn't happen. If I remember correctly, the only other product I've come across that uses the PXA320 is the Aceeca Meazura MEZ2000, which I think is still in the planning stage. Everyone else still seems to be using the older PXA27x, even in new designs. The PXA27x is certainly a good and time-proven processor, but it is no match for the PXA320 when it comes to performance.

Maybe something is going on that I am not aware of. Maybe Marvell isn't pushing the chip and it's such a secret that no one realizes technology has advanced. Maybe it's too expensive, or has some drawbacks I am not aware of. As is, the Nomad with its powerhouse PXA320 chip appears to continue to enjoy a significant performance edge over anyone else out there.

Posted by conradb212 at 12:36 AM | Comments (0)

September 26, 2008

The digitizer mysery

Imagine if someone had patented hard disks so iron-clad that no one else could make them. Or that an enterprising company had legally locked up LCDs such that it had a monopoly. If that were the case, we might still have giant, sluggish 20 megabyte (not gigabyte!) hard disks and computing as we know it would not be possible. And we'd all get eye strain from using smallish, barely readable antediluvian STN displays. That would be a bad situation. As is, fierce competition propels progress, and as a result we have the most wondrous products brought upon by innovation and improvement.

Except in one area.

Digitizers.

How much progress has there been since I began reviewing pen computers back in 1993? Basically none. And as far as I can tell, that sad situation sits squarely in Wacom's court. Wacom's patented digitizer technologies have resulted in Wacom having almost 96% market share in Japan, and a good 70% in the rest of the world. The Wacom digitizers I used on 1993 pen computers worked, sort of, but were hugely frustrating because it was essentially impossible to calibrate them. The Wacom digitizes I have used in vastly better and more powerful computers in 2008 worked, sort of, but were hugely frustrating because it's essentially impossible to calibrate them. I mean, there are any number of touch screens where you can calibrate 25 points or more, do edge compensation, and all sorts of other cool stuff geared towards enhancing precision and improving the user experience. A Wacom digitizer calibration? Four points, and that's it. Along the edge of the screen, the digitizer is often so badly off that it becomes frustrating to use it.

I've complained about this for pretty much as long as I can remember, and there hasn't been any change. Anything else in computing has improved dramatically. What gives? Is Wacom's technology inherently incapable of working better? Is no one else able to come up with a better alternative because of patent blocks? I don't know, but between Microsoft's marginal handling of the Tablet PC and the dismal performance of the Wacom digitizer, pen computing is where it is.

There. End of sermon. I just had to say it.

Posted by conradb212 at 01:53 AM | Comments (0)

September 02, 2008

MIL-STD-810F 509.4 and thoughts on salt water exposure

During a week of scuba diving off Roatan island in Honduras, I had first-hand experience of what salt water exposure can do to equipment. I took several underwater cameras with me for testing and used them on up to four daily dives to 85+ feet with each lasting an hour or more. I thoroughly rinsed off the equipment after each dive, but still found that salt accumulated under rubber coatings, inside screw holes, under screw heads and inside or under anything that allows water to go under or moisture to seep in. After I returned back home I soaked all equipment again in my bathtub and then cleaned each part and component. Without that, adjustment screws, hinges and joints could seize, and the equipment quickly deteriorate due to longer term corrosion.

I remember when Panasonic showed me the results of their Toughbook corrosion testing on an invitational tour of their facilities in Osaka back in 2002. Without special consideration of salt water and salt fog exposure, there could quickly be appalling damage as shown on the picture to the right (click on it for a larger version). Panasonic explained how they had been approached with requests for such testing, performed the salt water and salt fog tests, and were surprised to see the extent of the damage. They then systematically changed design and materials to ward off or minimize the effects of salt. This benefitted all subsequent Toughbooks, and also showed Panasonic how to develop special solutions for customers who use their products in environments where they are exposed to salt fog and water.

When you look at these pictures it becomes obvious that sealing alone is not enough when it comes to salt water exposure. Sealing standards only tell how well a product keeps dust and water out of the inside of the unit. They don't tell what salt can do to components that lay outside of the sealing barriers. What can salt do when it gets under a keyboard? Inside a hinge? Underneath protective doors? The result can be ugly. Nothing can ever ward off salt entirely when a product is used in marine environments. Users need to keep computers away from excess exposure as much as possible, and equipment needs to be cleaned meticulously after any exposure. That means that cleaning must be possible in the first place, which means that places that are potentially expose to salt water and fog must be accessible. There are just a whole bunch of additional considerations.

This is why the famous MIL-STD-810F (Department of Defense Test Method Standard for Environmental Engineering Considerations and Laboratory Tests) document includes a 9-page section on Salt Fog testing.

MIL-STD-810F Method 509.4 describes testing methods to determine the effectiveness of protective coatings and finishes on materials for corrosion, electrical effect and physical effects. The tests can also determine the effects of salt deposits on the physical and electrical aspects of materiel. The product is exposed to salt fog mist from a 5% salt solution via atomizers at about 95 degrees Fahrenheit for a minimum of four alternating 24-hour periods, two wet and two dry. The product is then examined for salt deposits that can clog or bind components, electrical malfunction, and potential short and long-term impact of any observed corrosion.

The reason why I am writing this all down is because my return coincided with an announcement from GETAC that its impressive B300 rugged notebook had received Salt Fog certification. Here's part of their press release:

LAKE FOREST, CA. – September 2, 2008 – GETAC Inc., a leading innovator and manufacturer of rugged computers that meet the demands of field-based applications, announced today that its B300 ruggedized notebook PC received full Salt Fog certification based on testing standards set by the Department of Defense (MIL-STD-810F – 509.4). Salt Fog is a specialized test used to evaluate and determine the effectiveness of protective coatings and finishes on materials to repel salt corrosion and may also be applied to determine the effects of salt deposits on the physical and electrical aspects of materials. Adding the Salt Fog certification to an already robust and rugged notebook PC makes the GETAC B300 the ideal choice for military installations, marine applications such as the Coastguard and other industries where salt or salt air can impact equipment performance.

“Salt is one of the most aggressive chemical compounds in the world,” said Jim Rimay, president, GETAC. “Salt will quickly corrode a computer’s exterior, impair vital electrical system functions through salt deposits and have a physical impact by restricting free movement of its mechanical components. The B300 addresses these issues with its Salt Fog certification and elevates it to an elite status among ruggedized computers for safe and uninterrupted operation in any location, especially in coastal regions of the world.”

We recently did a detailed hands-on test of the Getac B300 and found it to be a very impressive machine full of clever engineering and innovation. A combination of optical coatings and superbright backlight make the screen readable in the brightest sunlight, and amazing power conservation methods can extend battery life to a stunning 12 hours. It's good to see that the company also invests in testing against one of the less-often mentioned environmental threats to mobile computers -- salt fog exposure. While most specs include resistance to drops and vibration, salt fog/water exposure can destroy a piece of equipment just as surely. Once the corrosion is detected, it's usually too late, so it's nice to see Getac take proactive steps.

MIL-STD-810F, however, only describes testing methods, and not the criteria that determine passing tests. It would therefore be nice to know what Getac found during its tests, and what the company did to make the B300 as immune to salt fog damage as possible.

Posted by conradb212 at 02:31 PM | Comments (0)

August 06, 2008

The Motion Computing F5

We've had the Motion Computing F5 tablet here in the lab for a while. The F5 is a follow-up to Motion's C5 medical market tablet, which was a rather unique design solution that received a lot of positive feedback. The folks at Motion are generally right on the mark, and have been ever since some former Dell people formed the company back in 2002 or so to take on Fujitsu with a Tablet PC slate. At the time no one gave them much of a chance to prevail in a market that Fujitsu practically owned with their Stylistic pen tablets, but Motion pulled it off. I remember a dinner meeting with Motion founders Scott Eckert and David Altounian in San Francisco where they showed me the prototype of their initial tablet. It wasn't substantially different or better than what Fujitsu had at the time, but it was immediately obvious that the Motion folks truly believed in their product and that they had a very clear focus. That never changed. Whereas tablets are just a small part of their overall business for Fujitsu, tablets are the only thing Motion does. It's been six years now, and Motion never wavered from their mission. And somehow they always managed to stay ahead of the curve, with new technologies generally available in Motion products sooner than anywhere else.

I don't know what the thought process was that led to the design of the original C5 medical tablet, but it was certainly a smart decision to go after the medical market. It's a tough one to break into for a variety of reasons, but also one where mobile systems can make a huge impact. At Kaiser, the HMO I use, they finally have terminals in almost every examination room so they can call up patient info, and they can now also call up x-rays onscreen, but it took them forever, and I still see no portable electronics. I suppose it's the same elsewhere.

The Motion C5 was an attempt to provide a portable computer that could do more and was easier to integrate into the daily workflow of medical people. So they made it small and light and gave it an integrated handle to easily carry it around. They integrated an RFID reader and a bar code reader and also a camera. They also made it white so it fits in with all the other medical equipment, and it's easy to wash and disinfect. Motion also created a small, handy dock for it. So the overall idea was the provide a small computer that was easy to carry around and that included all sorts of data capture methods. It all still depended on systems integrators to package the hardware with medical systems software, and then have hospitals actually pick it up and use it. I am not sure how many did, but the Motion C5 was, and currently still is, probably the best mobile hardware for such projects.

When I first looked at the C5 I wondered why Motion limited the platform to just one market. True, it's a potentially huge market, but the C5 seemed sturdy enough to be used in other mobile applications, and it already carried IP54 sealing, which means it was didn't mind a bit of rain and some spills. Motion apparently agreed and created a second version of the C5, the F5. They called this one a "Field Tool," -- not the greatest of names, but obviously an attempt at communicating that this computer should be seen as a tool for jobs rather than a conventional computer.

I must admit, I had a bit of a hard time with the F5. When I wrote about the C5, I had no problem seeing the design decisions that had been made to make this computer just right for the medical market. The size, the shape, the features, the color and so on. The F5 is gray instead of white, but other than that, it's the same computer. It does include Motion's "View Anywhere" display because unlike the C5, the F5 would probably be used outdoors where sunlight viewability counts. So there wasn't any additional thought on how to make a computer best suited for use in the field.

The way I see it, the field IS different from a hospital. You won't always have a dock to charge a computer, and so the fairly small battery of the C5 may not be enough. And in the field it does come in handy to have a USB port or two and perhaps even an old serial port for some arcane instrument or measuring tool you need to hook up. And having some sort of expansion slot also comes in handy. Wireless communication is great and we can't do without, but it's been my experience that even with Bluetooth and WiFi, there are times when it's a lot simpler to just copy files onto a USB key or a SD card than to send them. The F5 can't do that as it doesn't have any ports or slots and totally relies on wireless or the dock.

All of this made it a bit more difficult to review the product. I am used to Motion having a very clear rationale for a machine, and in this case the rationale seemed to be that the healthcare C5 was good enough to be offered for other markets. That was probably a good idea, but something still doesn't feel quite right. Even the "View Anywhere" display that I remember as effective from previous reviews of Motion tablets seemed rather low-contrast compared to other sunlight-viewable technologies on the market.

The F5 is also one of the few machines that uses the Intel Core Solo processor. The Solo is essentially a Core Duo with one core not used, sort of like an 8-cylinder engine with only four of them running to conserve fuel. It is an economical chip, with a thermal design power of just 5.5 watts, which is only a bit more than half of what a Core Duo chip running at the same clock speed uses. Problem is that benchmark performance is much lower, too, and generally closer to the lowly Intel A110 than even an ultra-low-power Core Duo. The F5 is no slug at all, at least with Windows XP, but with Motion always being at the forefront of technology I wonder why they didn't just use an Atom processor instead. They did switch from the Core Solo U1400 to a Core 2 Solo U2200 which is said to include better caching and even more power-saving technologies, so perhaps that was the right move for now.

Anyway, just a few thoughts on what is, in fact, an interesting and welcome addition to the hardware alternatives available to those who need to implement computing solutions in the field. The official review of the Motion Computing F5, with pics and specs and all is here.

Posted by conradb212 at 02:03 PM | Comments (0)

June 23, 2008

Tablet PC: We could use a hammer....

"We could use a hammer..." That's the tag line of MobileDemand's latest video in their Tablet PC Torture Chamber Series where a man uses a Tablet PC to hammer a bunch of large nails into a board. The video is the latest in a series of increasingly sophisticated and outrageous demonstrations of just how tough their Tablet PC is.

Usually, rugged equipment is dropped or exposed to water to show that it can survive the kind of punishment encountered in the field. MobileDemand's earlier videos pretty much followed that tradition. xTablets were dropped, exposed to showers, rolled down a hill and so on. But soon the videos showed drops more extreme than anything that would likely happen in the real world. And instead of being exposed to a showerhead, the computer was strapped to the top of a car and run through a car wash five times, with the computer running and its display on camera during the whole ordeal.

And now the "We could use a hammer..." video. It's very smart. No one would actually use a computer as a hammer (though, come to think of it, I've used a variety of objects as hammers when none was handy), but the image of using that sophisticated piece of electronic equipment as a hammer certainly drives the point home, no pun intended.

Using the xTablet Tablet PC computer as a hammer really means to illustrate a point: shock and vibration do happen in the field. If you use a machine in a truck or as a data capture device you do not intend to damage it, but sooner or later it will fall. And constant vibration is affecting the computer. Eventually things can happen. Electrical parts may touch and short-circuit. Fasteners may come loose. Structural pieces may crack. Seals may deform and begin leaking. Electrical contacts may become unreliable. The display panel may become get out of alignment. Fasteners and ties may get loose. Wiring may chafe. Materials may fatigue and then break. Parts may deform or crack. And so on. At best, sealing may be compromised, electrical noise may be introduced, and individual parts are headed for failure. At worst, the computer fails.

This is why manufacturers usually provide test data, usually how a product performed when using the procedures described in MIL-STD-810F. Those procedures try to replicate conditions actually encountered in the field during transportation and operation. That makes sense, but the testing is quite involved and not very easy to interpret. Witness the following caution regrading acceleration testing found in MIL-STD-810F 514.5:

Care must be taken to examine field measured response probability density information for non-Gaussian behavior. In particular, determine the relationship between the measured field response data and the laboratory replicated data relative to three sigma peak height limiting that may be introduced in the laboratory test.

That's a mouthful, and the results are even more difficult to read. General integrity test conducted may then yield results such as, say, a power spectral density of 0.04G²/Hz, 20 to 1000Hz, descending 6dB/oct to 2000Hz. MobileDemand, like all the other serious rugged equipment vendors and manufacturers, has its gear tested in accordance with the MIL-STD-810F (and other) procedures, but what has more impact, some tech specs comprehensible only to engineers or a video of a man using the that rugged Tablet PC as a hammer and it still works?

"We could use a hammer..."

Brilliant.

To see the "We could use a hammer..." video, click this Blip.tv link.

Posted by conradb212 at 03:46 PM | Comments (0)

May 28, 2008

Electrovaya settles patent infringement suit

An interesting situation: An intellectual property company named Typhoon Touch Technologies announced Electrovaya had settled a patent infringement lawsuit by Typhoon and Nova Mobility Systems "for an undisclosed sum representing a royalty payment of at least 20% on past and future sales of its Scribbler Tablet PCs in the United States. Additionally, Electrovaya formally recognized the validity of Typhoon’s patents at issue in the litigation and acknowledged infringement of one or more of the patent claims." (see here)

20% on past and future sales of a tablet? Wow! And recognizing the validity of a patent? That's even more amazing given the vague and confusing nature of many patents. So what is this patent for? That would be US patents 5,379,057, issued January 3, 1995 and 5,675,362, issued October 7, 1997. They both have the same abstract:

"A portable, self-contained general purpose keyboardless computer utilizes a touch screen display for data entry purposes. An application generator allows the user to develop data entry applications by combining the features of sequential libraries, consequential libraries, help libraries, syntax libraries, and pictogram libraries into an integrated data entry application. A run-time executor allows the processor to execute the data entry application."

The drawings accompanying both patents show a tablet computer like the ones Momenta, IBM, NCR, GRiD, Samsung, Fujitsu, Dauphin, TelePad, Toshiba and many others offered for sale in the early 1990s. The picture on the right shows the drawing included in the 1995 patent and a couple of computers that precede it. The two computers I added for comparison's sake are a 1993 IBM ThinkPad 700/710 and a 1992 Dauphin DTR1. On the surface it's hard to see how a 1995 patent for a "self-contained general purpose keyboardless computer" could impact a 2008 Electrovaya slate when numerous companies made such computers already in the early 1990s. Then again, patents are finicky things and their interpretation is up to courts.

Anyway, the patents in question were issued to Microslate, a company that was certainly a pen computing pioneer with its ultra-rugged Datellite touch screen computers (see one of our early reviews of it in Pen Computing here).

Interestingly, Typhoon also sued Dell, Xplore, Sand Dune (the Tablet Kiosk folks) and Motion for infringement on touch screen technology and seeks damages for lost profits. Motion reached some sort of settlement. Typhoon apparently thinks that the patent in their possession covers just about the entire mobile market: "manufacturing, selling, offering for sale, and/or importing a variety of portable computer products, including but not limited to tablet PCs, slate PCs, handheld PCs, personal digital assistants (PDAs), ultra mobile PCs (UMPCs), smart phones, and/or other products covered by the patents-in-suit."

The suit has a co-plaintiff in Nova Mobility Systems, located in Tempe, Arizona. Nova, interestingly, offers the SideARM handheld. The SideARM was originally conceived by long defunct Melard and then became part of Microslate's lineup, the very company that was assigned those two patents. Typhoon's Form 10QSB shows that they bought the patents from Nova Mobility and agreed to pay them a 10% royalty from enforcements. So Microslate, an early player in the rugged slate market, sat on the patents all this time, then sold them, and now they are supposed to cover virtually every mobile device ever made even though such devices existed long before the patents? Elegant.

We're all in favor of respecting intellectual property, but figuring out what exactly that means isn't always easy. When I was a kid many decades ago I envisioned a little black box that told me everything I wanted to know by simply asking a question and let me communicate with anyone who had one. I doodled drawings of it. Does that mean I own the exclusive rights to cellphones, smartphones, Google and the entire web? Sadly not. But it would really be nice to at least have 20% of all those sales.

Posted by conradb212 at 04:36 PM | Comments (0)

May 26, 2008

XP Embedded: When benchmarks lie

Providing rugged mobile computers is a constant exercise in trade-offs and balancing. Screens get bigger and brighter, processors get fasters, disk larger, and customers want all that, without paying for it in the form of larger batteries and more weight. The problem, really, is that battery technology has not kept pace with the rest of the circuitry inside a computer, and so batteries struggle to provide enough juice to keep everything running for long. When you think about it, it's pretty bizarre that the very machines that are supposed to go as fast as possible often annoy their users by constantly trying to go to sleep, stand by, hibernate or shut off. Or that they come factory-configured to run at half speed and with the backlight dimmed.

The increasing power demand of the latest electronics (and in the processor department, their cost) has driven many manufacturers to look for alternate solutions. One is to pick a much simpler processor that consumes a lot less power. That approach, however, has its own problems. Two primary ones, in fact. The first is that customers think a machine with a "slow" processor cannot possibly be very powerful. And second that, in fact, it isn't. Fortunately there's a solution, albeit one that is only suitable for certain tasks and applications.

An embedded operating system.

See, a general purpose OS, like Windows XP Professional, is just that, general purpose. You can do anything you want with it, and run anything you want on it. With that in mind, Microsoft equipped Windows XP with all the drivers and software and utilities one could possibly need. The result is a rather large operating system with numerous processes and services running all the time, all consuming memory and power, and having the potential to slow even a powerful machine to a crawl.

An embedded operating system is totally different. The idea is to only use what you need to perform a certain task and leave everything else behind. This greatly reduces the size of the operating system and dramatically reduces hardware requirements. XP Embedded is generally used for smart, connected and service oriented commercial and consumer devices that do not need all of Windows XP, yet can still run thousands of existing Windows applications. An embedded OS can easily be as small as 40MB and it's even possible to cut it all down to around 8MB with a bootable kernel.

XP Embedded is not one-size-fits all. A company will determine exactly what a machine is for and what it should be able to do. They then include as many components (hence the term "componentized" operating system) as they need. There are over 10,000 available and it's easy to create lean, nimble embedded OS platforms that can still do sophisticated high level tasks like advanced multimedia, browsing, communications or whatever a task requires. An embedded OS can even run as a real-time OS via third party plug-ins. Essentially you get the power of the basic Windows XP engine, but without any overhead you don't need.

Which means that in an embedded systems machine, benchmarks do not necessarily tell the true story. They simply measure raw power, but not how efficiently that power is put to use. What all this boils down to is that a mobile computer with an embedded OS can be much faster than you'd think it is based on its hardware specs. In fact, we reviewed some that were so quick that almost no one would believe they ran on a low-power, inexpensive processor and just a minimum of RAM. So benchmarks would tell one story, real world performance another.

This is not to say that an embedded OS is the perfect solution for all mobile computing tasks. But it can be for organizations that build their own customized, componentized OS. And for those who have very clearly defined applications that work within the confines of an embedded OS.

Posted by conradb212 at 03:50 PM | Comments (0)

May 21, 2008

What happened to Symbol!?

Symbol Technologies was always one of my favorite companies. I visited their headquarters in Holtsville, long Island several times over the years and always came away impressed with their sleek designs and willingness to try out new ideas. That feistiness carried over into some aggressive acquisitions (like the bitter fight with Telxon) and, after some financial incongruencies, the sale of Symbol itself. Now Symbol is part of Motorola, but it isn't very clear what kind of part.

A good year or so after the acquisition Symbol seems to have been halfway absorbed into Motorola, but if you go by the Motorola website it's almost impossible to figure out how. Symbol is only listed as carrying bar code scanners, mobility software, and OEM scan engines, but no longer any handheld computers. The former Symbol handhelds have become sort of stateless, popping up under "Mobile Computers" without any brand name at all. So the former Symbol MC50, for example, is now just a "MC50," presumably somehow by Motorola.

It's actually quite sad to see all that. Symbol's once proud state-of-the-art handhelds now languish, carrying on in some way with dated processors and even more dated software. Some have unceremoniously been discontinued whereas others seem destined to just die from neglect. The MC35, MC50, and MC70 had a very promising career ahead of them when they were introduced, but now they are aging rapidly. The emphasis appears to be on the big and fairly conventional MC9000 Series of handhelds. They come in a variety of permutations with various size keypads, and they remain reasonably up-to-date with Windows Mobile 5.0 and Marvell (why does almost everyone still call them Intel when Intel sold the business a long time ago?) PXA270 processors.

There may well be method to this madness, and the decision to focus Symbol entirely on scanners may be a good one. Obvious it's not. And it's truly sad to see Symbol's proud legacy of handheld computers rapidly go to seed. I mean, make them part of.... SOMETHING!

Another sad thing is Motorola's website itself. It must rank right up there with the most confusing, least user-friendly ones I've seen. It's not surprising the company is in such trouble. The impression you get along every step of the way is, "We don't know who or what w are, or what we want to be!"

Frankly, as is, I think Symbol, and its customers, would have been a whole lot better off with Symbol intact and independent. Spin them off so they can get back to business, Motorola.

Posted by conradb212 at 01:21 AM | Comments (0)

May 06, 2008

A video says more than a thousand pictures

While it's still not entirely sure how the YouTube phenomenon is changing our view of the world, changed it has. Initially we thought YouTube and its many competitors were simply repositories for stuff people recorded off TV, but that has changed. These days, if anything happens anywhere, whether it's important or not, it'll be on YouTube in a moment.

However, the YouTube phenomenon has also led to entirely more serious changes in how things are being portrayed to the world. Specifically, video is being used to show what products can do. But that's not new, you might say. No, the idea of using video to highlight a product is not new, but the way video is being used now is. In the olden days, videos were mostly polished commercials, the kind we watch on TV (unless we have TiVo). YouTube gave video sort of an underground flavor. It's not glitzy footage created by Madison Avenue types, but clips done by us, the people.

Last fall, for example, we thought it might be fun to do an underwater video of one of the products we reviewed. It was by no means professional quality; we just used a little Casio digital camera with a YouTube mode. Then we set up a tripod in a pool, I donned my scuba gear and, bingo, video of a handheld computer being used underwater. This went up on YouTube with a rather innocuous title, "Trimble Nomad computer goes diving." Amazingly, even with this non-provocative title and very utilitarian keywords (trimble, tds, rugged, scuba, waterproof), the video has been viewed over 4,000 times in the few months since. Another one we did a bit later, of the Juniper Systems Archer Field PC, has also been viewed almost 2,500 times. Hmmm....

Turns out, an increasing number of entrepreneurial companies are taking advantage of the YouTube phenomenon by rolling their own underground videos. One of our sponsors, MobileDemand, has been playing a leading role by creating a number of videos that demonstrate the toughness and ruggedness of their xTablet slate computer. The result is a series of increasingly better and more outrageous videos that are both funny and compelling. While I never warmed up to Panasonic's omnipresent "Legally we can't say..." commercials/videos/billboards/print ads, MobileDemand makes their point much more convincingly (and at infinitely lower cost). And while the origins of the idea are clearly based on the YouTube syndrome, MobileDemand is running its videos on Blip.tv which has much better video quality.

If you haven't seen one of the MobileDemand videos you can do so right here by running the clips embeded in this paragraph. You see their flagship product being tossed around, thrown off a hill, and strapped to the top of a car and taken through a car wash. In a loose adaptation of the MIL-STD-810F "drop test" (officially called MIL-STD-810F Method 516.5, Procedure IV -- Transit Drop), you see the xTablet being dropped, rapid-fire, 26 times. To drive the point home they use the computer to pound a nail into a wooden board. All the while, video is running on the computer's screen so you can see that it still works and never skips a beat. That's pretty clever. Oh, and knowing that outdoor footage of a screen that is not outdoor-viewable isn't exactly compelling, the MobileDemand folks smake sure it's abundantly clear that theirs IS outdoor-viewable. It's all done in a fun, "YouTube" way. To demonstrate that their tablet's display, usually the most vulnerable part of a rugged computer, can take a direct hit, they drop a full beer can onto it. And then, to make sure folks realize that a beer can dropped from a few feet packs a punch, they drop one onto a guy's midsection. Ouch!

A video can clearly say more than a thousand pictures. That's because we've all become jaded with mere images. We all know how easily they can be edited, modified and faked. Video, that's another story. It's hard to fake a video of a guy hammering a big nail with his computer. Which means, for now, demonstrating products on funky videos is a great idea. It certainly doesn't replace images or the printed word as video is a serial medium that you pretty much have to watch from start to end as opposed to glossing over "random access" print.

Posted by conradb212 at 07:59 PM | Comments (0)

March 18, 2008

Shrinking military spending an opportunity for mobile vendors?

What I am about to write is based on assumptions and conjecture. It has to do with military procurement. And more specifically, military procurement of rugged mobile technology.

We've all heard about the proverbial $600 toilet seats and other supposed gross waste of resources. We also somehow assume that the military has ultra-advanced equipment and secret weapons that are more sophisticated than anything we can think of. In the same respect, having served in the military, I know that the armed services often use equipment that, by civilian and commercial standards, is completely and utterly obsolete. So what is true? That the military has incredible gee-whiz weaponry and gadgets, or is it all tried-and-true (and rather old) stuff?

Most likely some of both. When you peruse the product lineups of some of the defense contractors you see some shockingly obsolete stuff in there. Machinery powered by ancient Pentium chips, murky LCDs, a complete lack of modern interfaces and so on. Heck, our fighter planes are positively ancient if you applied the standards of, say, the automotive industry. Sure, they are said to be equipped with the latest computer gadgetry, but still, how up-to-date can decades-old designs be?

Anyway, I really want to talk about how all of this relates to the cost of rugged mobile equipment. In a recent summary report, Venture Development Corporation (VDC) reported that military spending on expensive rugged mobile technology may dry up in coming years. They also stated that this will leave an interesting opening for a new class of "good-enough" hardware that can fill most requirements, or all, at a considerably lower price. What this means is that the military may stop paying premium prices for traditional military market equipment from traditional military market vendors. So instead of simply ordering a successor model from an established (and presumably expensive) vendor, they may look around for less costly alternatives.

This indeed may present an interesting opening for some companies that have not traditionally dealt with the military market. It also means that such companies will have to take a crash course in how to deal with the military, learn more about requirements and certifications, and about service and sales cycles. Truth be told, we've seen a good number of "civilian" rugged handhelds that we believe could serve the military quite well whereas some of the traditional gear makes us wonder about its usefulness.

So are some vendors just a small learning curve and a few modifications away from being serious contenders for armed forces contracts? Or is dealing with the governments simply too cumbersome to even attempt for anyone other than the handful of defense contractors?

Costs, of course, are relative. Given that a very simple ankle fracture without any complications or anything cost a friend of mine the appalling amount of $28,000 five years ago, I can only imagine what the military's health care cost must be. Perhaps, compared to that, it simply doesn't matter whether a handheld costs $1,500 or $5,000.

Posted by conradb212 at 07:40 PM | Comments (0)

March 10, 2008

Keeping track of who makes (and sells) what

Keeping RuggedPCReview.com updated is no easy task. In the olden days, when we started Pen Computing Magazine back in 1993, there were only a small handful of companies that offered ruggedized equipment. These days, a even giant companies like Dell are realizing that adding durable and ruggedized equipment makes a lot of sense. I mean, in a mobile world not everyone is well-served with a flimsy, plasticky notebook that can't handle the potential abuse during a day on the job.

Anyway, keeping track of things... Not only is it quite a job to stay on top of every tech upgrade (and with Intel adding and changing processors every few weeks those come hot and heavy), it's often even more difficult figuring out who makes what and where it's being sold. For many years now, most notebooks sold in the world have been made by a fairly small number of Taiwanese and, increasingly, Chinese OEMs. For a while we licensed Pen Computing Magazine to a publishing company in Taiwan and I had a chance to go to Taipei to see them and also make a presentation on Tablet PCs in the Taipei International Convention Center. My hosts arranged for interviews with most of the major OEMs, such as Compal, Quanta, Mitac, FIC, Tatung and so on. That was very informative, but it's difficult to keep track of the ever-changing alliances between OEMs, ODMs, resellers, partners and customers.

So what does that mean for all the hundreds of rugged products listed and described at RuggedPCReview.com? Most are manufactured, though not necessarily designed, by an OEM in Taiwan. Many are joint productions where a computer company designs a product and then has it built by an OEM. Or the various aspects of design are divided in some way. Or a product is available from several vendors, but is customized for particular markets for different vendors. Sometimes there are exclusives. Other times the same machine is sold under different labels. There are also cases where an OEM sells a product under its own name, but that same product is also sold by other companies under different labels. This whole big supply chain means that there are many different ways of working together.

As for us here at RuggedPCReview.com, we always try to know who exactly makes a product. That's primarily so that we can state facts. If a product is really good, we'd like to know who deserves the praise. It makes no sense to heap praise on an OEM when the design actually comes from elsewhere. Or, the other way around, celebrate the genius of a reseller when they really did not design the product at all.

But that's not all of it. Another problem for us is that larger resellers do not necessarily offer the same machines in all markets. This morning, for example, I updated some product listings and realized that some of the old Dolch products were still listed under Kontron, the German company that had taken over Dolch in February of 2005. We had often marveled at Dolch's various rugged platforms at industry tradeshows and were bit saddened to see them get absorbed. After all, Dolch had been building rugged machines since 1987. So we relisted whatever Kontron took over as Kontron machines and added new contact information. Kontron had also created a new website, kontronmobile.com.

At the time, Kontron's CEO was quoted as saying, "This investment presents an excellent opportunity for Kontron to further expand its embedded computer solutions in the USA and Europe on mobile platforms for government and defense programs." Well, apparently it was not such a great opportunity after all as Kontron's US website now states, "Thank you for your interest in mobile rugged computing. This line of products was recently acquired by Azonix, a division of Crane Company." Azonix so happens to be a division of Crane, a multinational with over 10,000 employees. Azonix Corporation is located in Billerica Massachusetts and was set up in 1981 as a design and manufacturing firm specializing in rugged, high-precision measurement and control products. Some of the former Dolch/Kontron products are now part of the Asonix Military Grade Solutions product lineup, in competition with the likes of DRS Tactical and General Dynamics.

The Dolch/Kontron/Asonix NotePAC, however, looked familiar to me and it turns out to be a GETAC machine, the A790. On a hunch I go to the German Kontron website and it turns out that Kontron continues to sell rugged notebooks in that, and other, markets, just not in the US. In fact, the German Kontron lineup does not hide its GETAC origins. They have a whole line of Kontron NotePACs, all carrying the same model numbers as the corresponding GETAC machines.

Nothing wrong with all that, of course. It's just another example of how everything is going global. But after all is said and done, customers need to know who they can call if they need service and support. And then it is good to know they're dealing with a reliable, competent company that doesn't just slap a badge on a machine and pushes it out the door. In the end, it is that support and that local connection that matters and factors in big in that holy grail of vertical market mobile computing, the Total Cost of Ownership.

Posted by conradb212 at 06:48 PM | Comments (0)

March 03, 2008

Where will Intel's Atom chip fit in?

On March 3rd, 2008, Intel introduced the low-power Atom processor designed specifically for mobile internet devices. While desktop chips draw as much as 35 watts of thermal design power (TDP) and even ultra-low power Core Duos draw almost 10 watts, the Atoms will draw from 0.6 to 2.5 watts. Intel stresses that the chip is not a shrunken version of a desktop chip, but designed from the ground up. In a series of YouTube-style videos various Intel spokespeople describe Atom's use. It goes into really inexpensive ($250-400) notebooks. It is "Intel's architecture for mobile devices." It is for "devices that fit in pockets." And it is "the basis of new sexy: low power and small." And no fan is needed. Does this mean the Atom processors are meant to replace replace the ARM-based PXA processors that Intel jettisoned to Marvell?

It's really confusing with processors these days. Back in the early days of mobile computing everyone knew what to expect from an 8088 processor (including price, which was about $5), and then, say, a 386/16 or a 486/33. People even had a "feel" for how fast a Pentium 90 was going to drive an early Windows computer. Later, Intel's product lines mushroomed, but it was still kind of possible to guess how each would perform because in the public's mind, the clock speed of a computer chip determined how fast it was. Then Intel did away with that also, sort of, and now we have slower processors that are faster and faster ones that are slower. Processors are no longer sold on their specifications, but on what wonderful things Intel says they will do for us.

For those of us in the mobile field, one problem with Intel has always been that the company really had no mobile chips. Whatever found its way into notebooks was generally a crippled desktop processor. Sometimes crippled in terms of technology (like when one of two cores was simply disconnected as in the unloved Core Solo) and sometimes by running the poor thing with so little juice that it barely moved.

But Intel also had the PXA processors specifically developed for handheld devices you may say. Yes, they had, and it is not entirely clear why. Think back to the beginnings of Windows CE in the mid 1990s (it was introduced at Comdex 1996 to be exact). Windows CE began as a multi-processor architecture platform. Unlike desktop Windows PCs that almost exclusively relied on Intel, CE devices had a choice of several chip architectures. There was support for Hitachi's SuperH architecture and two variants of Silicon Graphic's MIPS engine, and then Microsoft announced support of the 486 and Pentium, the PowerPC 821, and the ARM architecture. I don't think the first three ever became real, but ARM support sure did. Anyway, the competition among chip manufacturers was heavy and resulted in sort of an "arms race" to deliver faster and more integrated chipsets. There quickly were faster versions of the Hitachi SH-3, Philips introduced the TwoChipPic set, and NEC the 4100 family. Toshiba announced its entry with the MIPS-based TX39 family of RISC processors (perhaps one of the quickest CE chips ever), and Digital Equipment Corporation the StrongARM 1100. And there was AMD with its 486-compatible Elan variants. Now that is competition.

Sadly, all that changed with Pocket PC 2002 when Microsoft dropped support of the MIPS, SH, and X86 architectures and mandated the use of an ARM core, which at the time was the SA1110 "StrongARM," and the ARM72xT and ARM92xT. That swiftly eliminated a whole bunch of CE device manufacturers from the market, and some never came back. At least, we thought at the time, ARM processors were made by Intel, Motorola, Texas Instruments, and ARM itself, but even then we assumed that there would be an emphasis on the Intel StrongARM and Intel's Xscale architecture.

XScale, of course, prevailed and was soon found in virtually all Windows CE devices. Now let's remember that StrongARM really wasn't an Intel invention at all. It originated with none other than the once mighty Digital Equipment Corporation, the supermini powerhouse that once seemed destined to replace IBM, but then meekly imploded and sold itself to Compaq, which meekly imploded and sold itself to HP. Somewhere along the process Intel picked up StrongARM and quickly morphed it into XScale. I remember several somewhat awkward conference calls where Intel reps tried to explain how XScale was different from StrongARM. In the end it really didn't matter as the Intel PXA chips became fairly competent workhorses for millions of Windows CE-powered devices.

However, XScale had fatal flaws. First, it couldn't run "real" Windows. Second, it wasn't a very lucrative business. And third, it was not invented here. So off it went, to Marvell. Marvell Technology Group -- a silicon solutions high tech firm based in Santa Clara, California -- officially took over Intel's communications and applications processors in November of 2006 and has since launched the PXA 3xx series, consisting of the high-end PXA320 running at 806MHz, the cost-optimized low-end PXA 300, and the PXA310. The 806MHz PXA320 is a scorcher as we found out in a review of the Trimble/TDS Nomad rugged handheld. Unfortunately, Marvell's marketing is so low-key that hardly anyone knows they exist. Check the tech specs of just about any Windows CE device and it still says "Intel PXA." And despite the remarkable power of the PXA320 chip, few have picked it up. Shame, that.

So now we have the Intel Atom chip. Designed from the ground up for mobile devices. Designed for cheap computers costing just 250-400 bucks. Not a shrunken desktop chip, but still one with 47 million transistors. One that goes into devices that fit into pockets but also on desktops, and those inexpensive notebooks. And then there's the new sexy, "low power and small." Why "Atom"? Because "it's the smallest element of computing."

Along with the Atom chip also comes Atom Centrino. With "Centrino" being a rather successful Intel strategy of bundling various Intel components and making the package look superior to just an Intel processor and then third party components, Centrino Atom is no surprise. Centrino Atom will include an Atom chip and companion chips for graphics and wireless for "the best mobile computing and Internet experience on these new devices."

The thermal design power (TDP) specs are certainly impressive. Just 0.6 to 2.5 watts, as opposed to almost ten for an ultra-low power Core Duo processor. And the 45nm process is unimaginably microscopic (the PXA processors use 90 nm) and certainly a testimony to Intel's expertise. Thermal design power, of course, is a somewhat odd measurement. It just describes, according to a Wiki entry, the "maximum amount of power the cooling system in a computer is required to dissipate."

To me, the question is where the chip will really fit in. One of the Intel clips has the spokesperson showing an OQO type of little computer with a slide-out keyboard. Quite obviously, the overall goal is to provide the kind and quality of internet access we've all become used to, and even more so since Apple showed that "real" browsing is possible even on something as small as the iPhone.

So what does Atom mean for the manufacturers of all those PXA-powered devices? With Marvell taking such a low-key approach, are they hustling to see if Atom perhaps is a better alternative? I am certain Intel hopes so. What are the respective power requirements? I don't think I've ever seen a TDP spec for the PXA chips. Whatever specs there are for the PXA320 would indicate substantial capabilities and power, but so far we haven't seen any device that takes advantage of all of its remarkable range of multimedia features (see Marvell PXA320 features).

There are, of course, other considerations. For example, we're seeing new products with Intel's A100/A110 chips that are part of Intel's UMPC 2007 platform. Those chips, essentially lower power M-cores, also use 90 nm technology, run at 600 and 800MHz and have 3 watt TDPs. Will these be totally replaced by the Atom chips that appear to have a range from 500MHz to 1.8GHz at lower to equal TDPs?

Time will tell.

Posted by conradb212 at 05:53 PM | Comments (0)

February 20, 2008

What do we make of Geode, VIA and Intel A100 powered devices?

As of late, I've seen an increasing number of small tablet-style devices that run Windows but do not use one of Intel's heralded Core processors, or even one of their lower-powered predecessor chips. That inevitably brings up the central conundrum the industry has been dealing with for the past 15 years or so. After dabbling with Windows CE in its various versions, Microsoft has pretty much decided that "real" Windows is the way to go. Any device that is not solely dedicated to performing a single task, or running a single custom app, will likely do other things or have to communicate with other computers. And that is when the problems start. Anything that doesn't run "real" WIndows will inevitable have browser problems, drivers and plug-ins aren't available and so on. Might as well give up and build a small device with real Windows. That can be done, but real Windows was designed for desktops and powerful laptops. It wants plenty of processing power and a big screen lest it all becomes an exercise in frustration.

So here we are, with Vista taxing even the most powerful machines and even XP desktops struggling to keep up with the myriad of functions and giant applications and add-ons and start-up programs and other gunk. Heck, my own personal 2GB Gateway notebook takes so long to boot Vista or bring up programs that I usually have meandered off to some other task by the time it's done. And yet, I see Microsoft plugging its Intel Ultra Mobile Platform 2007 with its A100 and A110 processors running at 600 and 800MHz, and AMD's Geode LX800 and LX900 at 500 and 600MHz. VIA's ultra low voltage C7-M runs at 1-1.5GHz and is probably in a somewhat different class, but in all instances we're far from Intel Core Duo and Core 2 Duo specs.

The question simply becomes this: Can a tablet powered by one of these chips really run Windows XP without its owner quickly giving up on it because it is too slow?

Unfortunately, there isn't an easy answer. See, it's really all a matter of software. Let's not forget that a couple of decades ago perfectly functional computers booted faster and ran their spreadsheets, wordprocessors and databases faster than what we have today, all on a few meg of memory and 16MHz processors. We have vastly more functionality today, but it's all become so complex that it often barely moves, and that is WITH powerful processors.

So why not simply scale back the software? That's a good idea but far from simple. If we only could just load Windows 98 onto a new machine and make it do whatever we need. It'd probably fly even on a -- by today's standards -- vastly underpowered machine. Sadly, it'd also be almost useless because it couldn't connect to anything and be incompatible with almost everything.

So the answer is to use today's software that speaks today's protocols and runs today's drivers, but remove as much overhead as possible. That can be done in several ways. You can, for example, load a standard operating system but do away with all the clutter and shovelware today's computers come with. You also remove all unnecessary startup programs, all unneeded background processes and so on. That still results in a big system, but it's surprising how much speed can be recovered by putting Windows on a diet.

Another approach is using Windows XP Embedded. What does "embedded" mean? Basically that you only pick those parts of a componentized operating system that you absolutely need for a task. Standard Windows XP or Vista load a computer with everything under the sun, whether you ever need it or not. An embedded version of Windows XP has ONLY what a device needs to do its job. That means it will be limited, but it will also be faster and use fewer resources. XP Embedded is especially well suited to run on a relatively small flash disk.

Yet another approach is to use one of the various Linux variants. Standard Linux distributions also have grown over the years and they now need much more space and have far larger resource requirements than they used to, but they are generally still smaller and faster than Windows. And since Linux is free and all its major applications are free, there can be substantial cost savings. Not everything is free, of course; companies who create custom applications to run on Linux systems can and will charge for licenses and upgrades.

All this gets me back to the original question: can a small slate computer with a minimal processor and minimal resources really run Windows at an acceptable pace? Does it all make sense? Some rather prestigious manufacturers seem to think so. Getac announced its lightweight rugged E100 tablet that uses an Intel A110 chip. Roper Mobile Technology announced the Geode-powered Duros Tablet PC. HTC's intriguing "Shift" can run both Windows and a clipped version of Windows Mobile, and Windows runs on an Intel A110. And there is a whole slew of other small devices that roughly follow what once was the Microsoft "Origami" ultra-mobile PC spec. All do Windows, and all use one of those ultra-economical processors (I hate the term "low-power" as it implies low performance rather than high energy efficiency) that is supposed to provide an adequate user experience while still providing halfway decent battery life.

What I'd really like to do, and I hope we get a chance here at RuggedPCReview.com, is to compare the Windows XP, XP Embedded and Linux versions of some of those machines side-by-side. I somehow cannot image that anything that runs XP on a 600MHz processor will be blindingly quick when even my 3GHz desktop is a slug, but it's entirely possible that a lean and specially configured rugged tablet with one of those high-efficiency (see, I didn't say "low power") processor is just what the doctor ordered.

Posted by conradb212 at 08:05 PM | Comments (0)