Rugged Mobility – The ML910 Motorola

Motorola released its ML910 Rugged Notebook and its MW810 Mobile Workstation-both meant to be the It for government workers and public safety folks. In other words, users who will most likely, whether intentionally or not, abuse their laptop in the field and open it to risk of theft and damage from those malevolent ne’er-do-wells looking to steal state secrets.

Thus, not only are these devices built to withstand a physical pounding, they can also handle your average hacker and other privacy attacks. The ML910 is built to U.S. Department of Defense standards, includes a fingerprint scanner, and can safely access wireless signals in a variety of formats, including LAN, GPS, Bluetooth, and WAN. The secret to the secrecy is special software proprietary to Motorola that allows it to bounce effortlessly between wireless bands.

The ML910 Motorola laptop also has one of the widest widescreens (13.3 inches) available of any “rugged” class notebook. Its hard drive is capable of starting up at freezing outdoor temps, and the notebook has an outside-environment sensory software that monitors air temps and can prevent system shutdowns from jumps in the mercury.

The MW810 workstation has similar technology to manhandle wireless work across multiple networks, as well as GPS technology to place yourself and your vehicle anywhere in the world. What sets this workstation apart from others is that it is built in three pieces-the CPU, the display, and the keyboard-all of which can be upgraded and swapped in and out on their own.

Now that we’ve got the cool spy stuff covered, we can check out the usual stuff, such as the ML910’s 1.7 GHz Pentium processor and its replaceable 40GB hard drive, the fact that it runs on old Windows XP (which might be a benefit to some), and that it comes with an integrated digital video recorder.

The ruggedized market has traditionally been the arena of Toughbook manufacturer Panasonic, but it’s great to see another brand offering competition in this sector.

Related article:

– Dell Latitude ATG D620 – Semi Rugged Notebook

By Henrik Stigell – Laptopical

Monday, April 09, 2007