Rugged and ultra-rugged phones: a brief history
Rugged portable devices have been around for a long time as purpose-built devices for specific industries or agriculture. These devices were bulky, heavy, and built for a particular service or function. Telecommunications over public cellular networks were not normally supported. That meant that users of such devices would normally carry a separate mobile phone for regular communications.
About 10 years ago, with the rise of Voice over IP, some companies began to adopt it as a mobile service, POC, that is, Push-To-Talk Over Cellular, and they looked for mobile devices to integrate and deploy it. This was before Android and other open platforms, so the service had to be developed and integrated as a proprietary solution built into existing mobile phones at the time.
Doing so was costly and reduced the applicability of these devices for typical consumer markets. These specialized mobile phones became purpose-built devices, primarily for vertical markets.
From this starting point, it made sense to make these devices even more suitable for use in industrial settings. In such environments, robustness was an obvious and desirable product capability. Therefore, some large mobile phone providers started to add more rugged unique models to their product portfolios. But the real takeoff of the rugged mobile phone industry came with the birth of a few companies, which did nothing else and whose products carved a new niche in the handheld industry.
This is what defined ultra-rugged rugged phones as purpose-built work tools and sparked a technological quest to improve product “robustness” with respect to structural integrity, mechanical and environmental reliability, waterproofing, ingress resistance , etc. Initially, available military and ingress resistance standards were adopted as benchmarks for mechanical, structural, and environmental qualification, but soon the leaders of these new industry segments developed and adopted their own reliability and performance standards. Industry leaders even developed their own qualification specifications and test equipment for them. Mechanical robustness was then complemented by functional performance improvements for the main areas of usability: audio had to be loud, clear, and the speakers had to face forward to facilitate hands-free use, the radio antenna, and location sensitivity had to be above average to work well indoors and in low-signal conditions, and battery life had to be sufficient for multiple shifts of heavy duty work, often stretching to a week or more of the most typical usage patterns.
The accumulated legacy in robust research and development of wearable devices made a natural transition to smartphones a few years ago. The open operating systems of these devices, especially Android, made it easy to add business services like apps. At the same time, the versatility of the smartphone as a consumer product made rugged smartphones attractive to many regular end users as well. Virtually all the major rugged features of a modern rugged smartphone, in design and functionality, are applicable and appealing to professionals and enthusiasts alike. Top of the line rugged products can be found in use in places as diverse as transportation fleets, first responders, extreme sports enthusiasts, the active lifestyle community, even the Department of Defense. These are the same basic products, even if they can be configured for a particular use.
The fact that the end-user price of top-of-the-line rugged smartphones is often close to that of regular consumer products is an achievement in itself. Of course, one should not look for above-average gaming or media capabilities in such products; that’s not what they were designed for. And, of course, you have to be careful with the imitators that each new trend creates. In the rugged phone segment, more than anywhere else, what you pay for is what you get.
The search for “robustness” continues today and some products have become ultra-tough and ultra-reliable for use in very difficult conditions, whether at work or as a companion in an active lifestyle.
