Industrial tablets

[ASF]

Hi all,

Looking for a recommendation for some large industrial tablets. Application is as follows:
- Not used for machine control, only QA data entry. So need a decent screen size to display A4 size forms
- Used in food production environment - so clean, but chemicals and steam are around. They won't be subjected to it deliberately, but will need to be able to withstand being sat on a table and having an overenthusiastic cleaner give it a bit of a spray with a hose
- Ideally windows-based, but might be able to use something with Android
- Needs a decent battery - it will be getting used on and off all day, and put on charge in the evening

Anyone got any success (or horrible, debilitating failure) stories to share?

 

[willxfmr]

Last place I was at used tablets from these folks and they seemed to hold up pretty well. And it was also a food plant with, I assume, similar conditions.

http://us.getac.com/index.html

 

[Jsu0234m]

We have had good luck with the Panasonic Toughbooks. I'm not sure if they're still made or not but we have two of them that have been thoroughly abused in food manufacturing and they still work great. I dropped one of them about 8ft and it didn't even cut off, i went down got it brought it back up and kept on working. We are pretty hard on our equipment and they hold up great.

 

[xC0MMAND0x]

What is your SCADA / application you are running? Is the app on a terminal server?

 

[arlenjacobs]

The Panasonic Toughbooks are awesome. They are designed to survive, and have hot-swappable batteries.
But, they are not cheap, light, or thin.


The most clever idea I've seen comes from Captec. They have a rack charging station for the tablets.
http://www.captec-group.com/products/tcs-8-bay-charging-station/
Hey, it may be nice to use an iPad, Toughbook, or Surface but where do they go at the end of shift? How are they safely stored and charged? How do you quickly see if one is missing?


You could try looking at XCIEL (which I am not endorsing). It looks interesting, but at the same time I find it hilarious.
http://xciel.com/xcpro3-surface-pro-3/1844049
They take a regular iPad or Surface and claim the following, even though the electronics inside it are consumer grade (ie. not even close to these certifications):

• C1D2
• ATEX Zone2
• IECEx

So, if you do look into that one be sure to talk with them about their testing, certification procedure, and any exclusions that they have for those certs.

 

[ASF]

Thanks guys. The Getac and Panasonic units were two that kept coming up in searches, but it's always good to hear from people that can vouch for them personally!

For this application they really just need network access and a web browser - the tools that they will be using these for are all web based.

Thanks guys!

 

[xC0MMAND0x]

Why not just use iPads with "industrial cases" - surely that would be significantly cheaper? You can use MDM solutions (check out Cisco Meraki) to lock them down so they can't access anything other than what you need.

Even if you break one or 2 every so often, in my experience, you can typically get around 8 iPads for the cost of a single "industrial tablet" running Windows on it - and better battery life / performance.

I assume you have wireless infrastructure in place?

 

[dpslusser]

Check out MotionComputing.com as well.

Have used a few of these in the past. Best part is Daylight Viewable screen.

 

[ASF]

Why not just use iPads with "industrial cases" - surely that would be significantly cheaper? You can use MDM solutions (check out Cisco Meraki) to lock them down so they can't access anything other than what you need.

Even if you break one or 2 every so often, in my experience, you can typically get around 8 iPads for the cost of a single "industrial tablet" running Windows on it - and better battery life / performance.

I assume you have wireless infrastructure in place?

That's true - yes, we have very good wireless coverage throughout the whole site, so we could potentially look at that...I'll add that to the mix...

 

[Saffa]

We have been using ipads for a while now for our utilities field staff. We have them fitted in Survivor cases and they hold up just fine.

The only thing I'd suggest could be done better is the the iPad security management. I think there are 3rd party services for this but trying to run everything on individual or a shared itunes account is a nightmare

 

[Phil Buchanan]

Why not just use iPads with "industrial cases" - surely that would be significantly cheaper? You can use MDM solutions (check out Cisco Meraki) to lock them down so they can't access anything other than what you need.

Even if you break one or 2 every so often, in my experience, you can typically get around 8 iPads for the cost of a single "industrial tablet" running Windows on it - and better battery life / performance.

I assume you have wireless infrastructure in place?

This would be my suggestion as well. We use IPads with defender cases and we run our application on Thin Manager to work with the mobile platform.

 

[gavreid]

The Panasonic Toughbooks are awesome. They are designed to survive, and have hot-swappable batteries.
But, they are not cheap, light, or thin.


The most clever idea I've seen comes from Captec. They have a rack charging station for the tablets.

Hey, it may be nice to use an iPad, Toughbook, or Surface but where do they go at the end of shift? How are they safely stored and charged? How do you quickly see if one is missing?


You could try looking at XCIEL (which I am not endorsing). It looks interesting, but at the same time I find it hilarious.

They take a regular iPad or Surface and claim the following, even though the electronics inside it are consumer grade (ie. not even close to these certifications):

• C1D2
• ATEX Zone2
• IECEx

So, if you do look into that one be sure to talk with them about their testing industrial tablet, certification procedure, and any exclusions that they have for those certs.

Hello.
I am looking for suggestions for a rugged Android tablet to use Reachview 3.
We want to use the Emlids with mor eof our field staff and I am looking to learn from anyone who has experience using any android tablets. Currently I use an Android phone but if I am giving over the system to our field staff a tablet would have a bigger screen and presumably long battery power.

Thanks in advance!