Rugged Notebooks: Just how tough are they?

Moving beyond the niche

Although rugged notebooks have been around for a while, high price points have constrained growth and kept the products niche.

"If you look at ruggedised notebooks there are some systems that you pay a significant premium for to be able to have certain capabilities," Lenovo's Ruettinger said. "So to be waterproof, dustproof and even to have things like protection against pyrotechnics. For example, if you are on a battlefield and an explosion goes off next to you, will the notebook survive? There is a market for that kind of rugged, but that is to us a niche market. And when you talk about our channel quite often that is a defence market, a law enforcement market, which of course the majority of channel partners don't actually play in."

However, there are signs the technology employed is beginning to migrate to the mainstream and be taken up by other verticals. The profusion of semirugged notebooks at affordable price points is indicative of this trend.

"What happens is most people don't need to pay the price premium to have units that can have a tank roll over them," Tegatech's Ortega said. "Most people can have sufficient ruggedisation out of a version that can have a spit of water over it." For many industries including mining, construction, real estate, utilities, couriers and logistic, semi-rugged notebooks suffice.

"Our biggest clients are defence at the moment but we are starting to move into the utility services market," Avantec's Cawsey said. "Our biggest client in Australia is Western Power."

Toshiba product marketing manager for the business range, Matt Tumminello, also highlighted education as a target vertical for semi-rugged notebooks.

"Although they are not in a dusty, dirty, splash environment they [students] tend to take less care and have less focus on their notebook," he said. "Throwing their bag down at the bus stop to play handball perhaps is a far greater priority than taking care of their notebook is."

Yet, in general people are valuing their data more and more as the digital age evolves and are beginning to realise the benefits of rugged offerings, Tumminello claimed. "You only have to lose your data once and then you become very conscious," he said.