How To Ask Your Sales Rep The Tough Questions About Rugged Mobile Devices

By Bob Ashenbrenner, Xplore

Sooner or later, you’ll be in one of your conference rooms with a sales person touting a mobile device they swear will be perfect for your business needs. Whether it is a smartphone, tablet or notebook PC, what you need to know is if it is rugged enough to survive the ropes with your field technicians.

Your techs may be working in frigid temperatures in the blizzard-prone Northeastern U.S. or in the high Florida humidity during post-hurricane disaster recovery. Or perhaps your team is responsible for maintaining infrastructure in the arid Southwest desert, where the sun shines high and bright all day and temps soar well into the triple digits for several months out of the year. Regardless of the unique operating environment your field service teams face, the one consistency among all utilities worldwide is the need for techs to have rugged mobile devices that are fully available to them, meaning fully operational , at all times. Of course it would be beneficial if all your entire team utilized a single mobile platform – device, software, etc., regardless of job title or job location. You just need to make sure what whichever form factor is chosen, it will always be rugged enough to survive in extreme job environments and always ready to adapt to evolving data environments. A compromised device – whether broken during a drop, shut down in heavy rain, or running way too slow after being in a hot truck –is just not acceptable.

So you ask the smiling salesperson, “Is this mobile device rugged enough?” “Sure,” comes the reply. “We are MilSpec and IP rated. And we have a temperature range of 0°C to 40° C.”