E500RM9

Do note right up front that the E500RM9 is not an attempt at a rugged iPad. For that, it's too small, thick, and heavy, and it doesn't have the capacitive touch screen needed for pinching and zooming and such. Instead, this new Winmate device packs Windows into a smaller enclosure than most. Much smaller than full-size rugged tablets that traditionally have had 8.4-inch or even 10.4-inch displays, and smaller also than the fairly popular 7-inch rugged tablets. The case for a very small full Windows tablet At a time when consumer market tablets are selling by the tens of millions and everyone wants the slimmest, glitziest, easiest-to-use tablet to zoom and pinch on and anyone that doesn't measure up fails, what's the case for a big PDA that has a resistive touch screen and runs an embedded version of Windows XP? Sometimes you simply need Windows, and the full version of it—Almost no one loves Windows, but depending on what all one includes as an operating system, between 80 and 90% of all computers still run Windows. And of all those Windows machines, a good third still runs Windows XP. That is an awful lot of computers, which means an awful lot of applications that run on those computers, and an awful lot of people who know how to use them. In such a vast universe of Windows users, there is quite likely a good number who'd like their Windows on a small 2-pound tablet with a 5-inch screen. Size and weight can matter—Sometimes a device needs to be a certain size and no larger and no smaller. And while this Winmate device is no Pocket PC and still weighs two pounds, it is markedly smaller and handier than 7-inch or 8.4-inch class rugged tablets, and the weight is lower. That can make all the difference. So if full Windows is needed, but there's no room for a larger tablet, two pounds and a 5-inch screen is about as small a screen as you can go with Windows still being useful. Data capture—While our review machine didn't have it installed, Winmate offers the E500RM9 with a 1D/2D barcode reader and/or an RFID reader, making it a full-featured data capture device. Here again, it may come in handy to have full Windows XP instead of the smaller API set of Windows CE. And, again, you get the whole thing in a two-pound rugged device. We didn't discuss any of the above with Winmate and don't know the decision process that made them decide to go this way. But we can see a rationale and business case. A look around and inside the Winmate E500RM9 Depending on how you look at it, the Winmate E500RM9 is either a massive PDA or a very small tablet PC. Its housing is silvery plastic with protective elastomer end caps. The picture on the right shows the device from the front and all four sides. Going around the unit: The left side has a docking connector for the optional vehicle docking station. The top and bottom are protected by elastomer bumpers and also have loops for a hand strap. These end caps look like they might cover an expansion interface of some sort, but they are really just protecting the unit's two external antennae. The right side shows a protective, hinged plastic cover with a pressure seal. Underneath are the tablet's external ports: power, audio in and out, a USB 2.0 port, an RJ45 LAN port, and two slots, one for a micro-SD card and one for a SIM card. As we usually do in full reviews of ruggedized products, in order to get a better idea of the Winmate tablet's construction and manufacturing (and also how easy it is to service it), we took a look inside. The plastic clamshell halves of the device are held together with a number of small Philips screws. The sealing of the two halves is via a rather complex and intricate O-ring style rubber pressure seal with numerous cutouts for an equal number of plastic blocks, nubs, and guides in the housing. All this secures the rubber seal very precisely, but it also means that very careful assembly is required to keep the seal from getting crimped, with results in potential leaks. The E500RM9's wired communications (shown in the picture on the right) are all concentrated in a recessed area along the right side of the unit. It is adequately protected with a hinged plastic/rubber door that can be a bit of a fingernail buster to open. Judging by the interior construction of the device, it's likely that Winmate could make available custom I/O configurations if a customer has different requirements (like, for example, serial ports, etc.) Inside, this Winmate 5-inch PC is a remarkably complex device. While the guts of an iPad consist of essentially just a very small (albeit highly integrated) circuit board and a very large battery, inside the E500RM9 there's a whole lot of electronics. As you can see in the pictures below, the inside view of the 5 is dominated by a large, thick metal heat sink (see image on the left) that is screwed down tightly onto the inner metal frame of the unit. A set of black fins fit into cutouts in the outer plastic housing, presumably to facilitate heat removal. The entire block of fins is sealed against the housing with a rubber pressure seal, which constitutes another potential area for water to get in. Also interesting is that the large heat sink doesn't actually remove heat from any chips directly; it's simply screwed onto the frame. The unit's low-power Atom chip, of course, doesn't generate much heat, but there is a lot of additional gear in there, so the heat sink is apparently necessary. In the center picture above, with the heat sink folded out of the way, you can get a better look at the 7 x 3.875-inch motherboard. On the motherboard is a mini PCIe slot taken up by a Huawei Mobile Broadband EM770W HSPA Module that offers GSM/GPRS/EDGE, WCDMA as well as HSDPA. The optional Mobile Broadband board is underneath a mezzanine interface board that contains a SIM Card slot, a microSD card slot as well as two connectors with an unknown purpose. Also mounted on the board is a small QCOM Technology QBT400UB Class 2 BT version 2.1 + EDR module with an integrated antenna. What appears an impossibly small camera/LED module is screwed onto the inner front of the housing (see upper right corner of the rightmost image above). It's a Synertron Technology EM4720A 2mp autofocus module complete with a 1/4-inch CMOS sensor, PCB, lens, and image processing. The module is capable of taking 1600 x 1200 pixel still pictures and 30 frames per second VGA (640 x 480) video. Amazingly, the little thing (shown with a US quarter in the picture to the right) also includes a 0.5-watt LED light to illuminate subjects. Also on the motherboard is a single RAM slot that was occupied in our review unit with a 1GB Transcend DDR2 667MHz module, securely locked in place with a couple of gobs of silicon glue. The same small gobs of white silicon glue also ascertain that other vital connections do not vibrate loose. The same glue is also used to seal a couple of holes drilled into the left and right sides of the housing so that antenna wires can go through. The E500RM9 tablet has two rather powerful 7.4V/2,600mAH (19.24 watt-hour) rechargeable Lithium-Ion batteries, both fitting into compartments in the back of the unit. Putting the batteries in place requires a bit of doing, and since the battery compartment has an opening to the inside of the unit, a good fit of the pressure seal glued onto the backside of the housing is essential to keep out dust and liquids. Also note that if you want to replace batteries in the field, bring along the proper Torx screwdriver for the screw that holds each battery cover in place. Finally, while the two protective rubber-over-plastic end caps look like they might cover an expansion interface of some sort (and the E500RM9 brochure states the availability of an optional scanner that snaps onto the top of the unit), on our review unit the caps simply protected the two external radio antennae. Overall, the Winmate E500RM9 with its plastic housing-over-metal-frame construction is well designed and executed, as we'd expect from a company as experienced in embedded systems design as Winmate. It's a complex design, however, and a number of seals must all be in good working order to keep out dust and liquids. The seals are solid and well designed, but users and service personnel must keep in mind that even small cuts, tears, or crimps can cause leaks. So any of these Winmate tablets that will be operated near their sealing limits should be carefully inspected. Intel Atom-powered: fast enough for embedded OS Anyone expecting bold new technology in the processor department, such as perhaps a low-power ARM processor, maybe a bit disappointed. What you find under the hood of this new Winmate crossover tablet is the lowly 1.1GHz Intel Atom Z510 processor that's been used in a few Intel Atom-powered vertical market and industrial devices ever since its debut in the spring of 2008. The E500RM9 belongs to the initial generation of Atom processors that was codenamed Silverthorne and has a tiny 13 x 14 mm package footprint. Small though it is, the processor has about 47 million transistors, which is more than the Pentium 4 had. Silverthorne chips were originally targeted at mobile internet devices (MIDs) and Intel created an entirely new and very power-efficient "Poulsbo" System Controller Hub (SCH) for them. The Poulsbo chipset includes a GMA graphics system, high definition audio, a PATA controller, and PCIe, SD, and USB support, and uses only about two watts, which means total CPU and chipset consumption isn't even 5 watts. But even compared with the fairly popular (in vertical market devices) E500RM9, the E500RM9 has a slower system bus and lacks Intel's hyper-threading. In performance benchmarking, the E500RM9 offers only marginal performance that's considerably below even that of the Atom N270 processor that powered the tens of millions of first-generation netbooks. However, used with a bare-bones operating system such as XP Embedded installed in our evaluation unit, the E500RM9 actually makes for entirely adequate performance. On the other hand, while the chipset does have inherent support for H.264, MPEG4, and HD decoding, it needs additional hardware for that (like the Broadcomm "Crystal HD" High Definition hardware decoder) or at least the proper decoders. Without it, video performance is marginal. That could potentially be a drawback for a rugged tablet that customers may want to use for video and imaging. Also, Atoms have proliferated at an alarming rate. There are almost 50 different Atom processors now (see the current list of all Atoms), and many new products are taking advantage of the latest advancements in Atom processor technology. Then again, the E500RM9 is a tried and true processor option that, with its "embedded" status, will be supported for a long time. Ruggedness As the name "Rugged Handheld Device" implies, the E500RM9 is a tablet designed to handle a good deal of abuse out there in the field. Winmate has an unusually complete set of ruggedness and certification documentation available for online viewing, but unfortunately not yet for the E500RM9. So for now we officially only know the following: The operating temperature is 14 to 122 degrees Fahrenheit (-10 to 50 degrees Celsius). That's good enough to cover almost all deployments for a device like this. The E500RM9 can handle a drop from four feet to concrete, according to MIL-STD-810F Method 516.5. No further details are available, but four feet is about what you'd expect from a rugged tablet. IP65 sealing, which means it's totally sealed against dust, and it can also handle low-pressure water jets from all directions, though with limited ingress permitted (we never like to hear that). Winmate also lists testing according to MIL-STD-810F Method 514.5 for vibration. As is, the E500RM9 feels like it can handle plenty of abuse, and there isn't anything that looks like it could break or twist. The rubberized bumpers provide corner and edge protection, the display feels sturdy, and whatever might get scratched or broken can easily be replaced. The Winmate E500RM9 5-inch Rugged Handheld Device The Winmate E500RM9 is an unusual product that attempts to address many roles. It's a full PC running an embedded version of Windows, and not "just" Windows CE. That can be quite important for certain applications. And unlike very small PCs of the past, thanks to a smart combination of efficient hardware and more than adequate battery power, the E500RM9 works well as a PC and is not just a technology demonstration. The Winmate E500RM9 also addresses the demand for a tablet that's smaller and lighter than the more traditional rugged tablets with 7 to 10-inch displays. Measuring just 8 x 4.7 inches and weighing barely more than two pounds, it's certainly much lighter and handier than full-size tablets. What the E500RM9 is not addressing, and apparently does not seek to address, is to be a rugged version of a consumer media tablet. For that, it'd need a capacitive touch display instead of a resistive one that mostly relies on a stylus. The device is also not Windows 8-ready. For that, it'd again need a capacitive touch screen, higher resolution, and more powerful hardware. Instead, the Winmate E500RM9 is just what it looks like: a very large PDA that runs Windows. Its 5-inch display is very bright and has very good reflection control for outdoor use. While its 1.1GHz Intel Atom E500RM9 is no powerhouse, it's more than quick enough thanks to a lean embedded operating system. Its generously sized dual batteries last a long time, there's no fan to make noise or get clogged, and the unit seems rugged enough to handle outdoor work. Add good onboard connectivity (USB, LAN, audio, dock), good expansion capabilities (microSD card, SIM card, microPCIe), and the availability of GPS, 3.5G WWAN, scanner, and RFID, and you have a unique device that may just fill a potentially interesting niche.