Ruggedized devices - what do You know about it ?

General information

How many of You know the market of ruggedized devices ?

I guess, that not a lot. In my opinion, we should be aware of this branch of mobile devices' market. Where are these products in a market? Are they useful? Are they being used? Do companies make a profit of that?
The answer might be suprising for some of You, but ruggedized devices' market is really important nowadays, and become more and more popular. Here is very general tree of mobile devices, with the position of ruggedized devices:

Laptop
smartphones
PDA
Palm tops
Ruggedized

As we can see our devices are in the branch of PDAs. OK, but the question is - is it really used in industries nowadays?
YES, IT IS !


Do copmanies use ruggedized devices now?
Companies producing, delivering have need of speeding up the operations (for example in the warehouse). WMS (warehouse management system) with feature of centralized labeling the pallets make, that there is no more mess in warehouses. But how the ruggedized devices support that? Scanning these labels is possible by using the scanners. These scanners are in the reality ruggedized PDAs. Implemented WMS mobile client allows to get connected to the system.

As everyone knows, the workers in the warehouse work in extreme conditions (hot,cold, falling devices). To avoid damages of the devices, the engineers designed new kind of product - ruggedized PDAs.

Every company, which has warehouses, travel goods, makes inventory, and imple,meted the systems like TMS, or WMS will use PDAs, especially ruggedized.


Market
There is no monopoly on the market for now, but we can choose two dominating companies in this business. These are Motorola(who bought Symbol company) and Intermec.

In the article are listed others producents, like Datalogic, Janam, or Psion, but these companies cannot compete with the giants ... yet.
Anyway, in the article we can see Gartner's classification, showing how the companies do on the market (data from 2007).

Article overview
We can see compare between companies producing ruggedized devices, if You feel like reading this, be my guest !
For these, who don't have much time - take a look at Motorola section. You will see there brief decription of products, and short decription of Intermec - Motorola battle.
If You want to see how ruggedized are ruggedized devices, take a look at this video


Sources:
http://pl.youtube.com/watch?v=JuhEUTPxFeY
Gartner, " MarketScope for the 'Ruggedized'-Handheld-Computer Market, 2007"
Own knowledge, which I wanted to share ;)