Windows Phone Thoughts: Indestructible and Pocketable? Olympus Intros R1000 Series WinCE device

"Until the release of the Olympus R1000 series tough digital assistant (TDA), there have been no rugged PDAs maintaining the compact size of consumer models. By no means would a hotel consider handing out for example; a Dell Axim X30, to their customers upon arrival, the thing would be dead within weeks. If you wanted something durable and reliable, it would have to be big and chunky! If you wanted something secure, it would have to be specifically designed to your hardware and application specs with custom modifications. The R1000 series is all that and more. <...> We dropped it from 4 feet, 5 feet and 6 feet, threw it, spilled drinks on it, Olympus even ran it over with an SUV (we didn’t have the guts, or authorization to do so), but we’ll take their word for it."



Okay folks, let's clarify right away. This is NOT a consumer device. As such, there are many peculiarities with this product line that would prevent most of us from ever wanting one, such as the DragonBall MXL processor, the lack of expansion slots (though plenty of RAM), and the OS selection (WinCE 4.2 or Qtopia Linux v2.3.6 but no option for WM2003/WM2003SE). At a size of 5.2" x 3.0" x 0.6" (132 x 76 x 160 mm) and weight of 6oz (180g), the real significance is that this device is the first industrially "rugged" device available with the compact form-factor of today's consumer PDAs. Until now, if you wanted a physically tough device, you either had to buy a much larger and heavier industrial PDA from a specialist such as Symbol or you had to resort to larger, specialized cases such as the Otterbox. Let's hope that future PDA's will make use of the same polycarbonate plastic shell that makes this one so light and strong.