Tablets are quietly proving to be an honest various to laptops, particularly within the enterprise world and for area of interest sectors that require one thing strong, highly effective and cellular.
Oh and overlook about shopper tablets or these that include rugged or hardened instances as they haven’t been designed from the bottom as much as survive the type of battering that a few of these units bear.
The Xplore iX125 R1 (bought in different markets because the XSlate R12) is an instance of how far cellular computing has come over the previous decade, that includes hardware that competes with and sometimes exceeds what’s obtainable on laptops with a comparable quantity.
That is the newest mannequin from a collection initially launched by Movement Computing – Xplore acquired the corporate in 2014 and carried on with the vary, which continues to be well-liked with companies on the lookout for rugged options to the large names.
With an MSRP of £2,248 excluding VAT (round $2,820, AU$three,710) for the bottom unit (from Centerprise or Spirit Data Capture), that is an costly piece of package; however there’s extra to it than only a huge price ticket.
And positively don’t anticipate this to be your commonplace pill. It weighs an enormous 1.84kg – though that features its bundled Bluetooth keyboard – which is round twice the load of some ultraportable laptops available on the market (just like the Fujitsu Lifebook U937/P or the LG gram 15).
With a thickness of 18mm and footprint of 210 x 330mm, it's virtually as giant as some 15-inch laptops available on the market, however somewhat than being overtly cumbersome, the iX125 R1 feels about the proper measurement for what it supplies – primarily because of its magnesium alloy body.
As anticipated, a lot of the additional weight comes from the sturdy outer case, the connectivity choices and the bigger than common battery.
Xplore has adopted the kind of octagonal-like form widespread to many rugged smartphones (such because the Homtom HT20), one which we name ‘four+four’ because it entails having 4 lengthy sides, and 4 very brief diagonal ones on the corners of the system, because it have been.
The entrance of the pill is adorned with three inexperienced lights on the left, and a 12.5-inch Full HD show that includes Corning Gorilla Glass four (which felt clean to the contact because of the proprietary View Anyplace know-how).
What this design does is scale back the potential degree of shock to the corners of the pill display (which stays rectangular) thus hopefully avoiding any injury. With a quoted 800 nits brightness, the display remained viewable even in direct daylight (or what passes for daylight within the UK’s winter).
There’s a 2-megapixel webcam situated bang within the center full with two sensors and what appears like two microphones (there’s one other one on the again). 
Flip the slate over to uncover an Eight-megapixel digital camera with a flash, 4 hidden magnets (to maintain the stand and the Bluetooth keyboard in place) plus a number of connectors to accommodate the flurry of equipment that may really exploit the facility of the hardware contained in the iX125. These equipment vary from a docking station to a knowledge acquisition module with a barcode scanner.
The again of the pill is roofed with dozens of rubber dots to reinforce grip. The keyboard connects to the pill by way of Bluetooth, in principle, however we bumped into some driver points when making an attempt to pair the 2.
As for the keyboard high quality itself, there’s nothing a lot to say about it besides that it's nice for brief textual content entry; it feels low cost, has a built-in battery and a tiny touchpad.
A three,080mAh/45Wh battery powers the pill and could be eliminated – we simply want that it was simpler to take action. You will have to take away gloves to carry out this operation, and the battery doesn't come out as simply as one would anticipate. As soon as it’s eliminated, you’ll discover a microSD card reader and a SIM slot beneath.
A flap hides a Qualcomm 4G connectivity module (Sierra Wi-fi Airprime EM7455) in addition to an M.2 SSD. One other flap protects the facility port, plus there’s a full-size USB three.zero connector, a headphone socket and an HDMI port. Wired Ethernet and a serial port – by way of a dongle – are additionally out there behind a sealed rubber door that we couldn’t pry open.
There’s no USB Sort-C port right here, which doesn’t come as a shock given how sluggish enterprises are at adopting new know-how, particularly in relation to connectivity.
An influence button, an air vent, a combo button (that emulates a Ctrl+Alt+Del mixture), a fingerprint scanner, quantity buttons and a wired Wacom lively digitizer are scattered across the edges of the system.
The slate is IP54-rated which signifies that it's protected towards mud and water spray from all instructions with restricted ingress permitted. In apply, we wouldn’t advocate risking it because the air vents on the again give direct entry to the heatsink fan and the CPU.
However the fan and related vents are in a sealed compartment away from the electronics. The warmth is transferred by means of a heatsink that permits it to dissipate with out permitting any moisture or mud into the system.
We had the chance to listen to the complete pressure of the fan a number of occasions – and it does get noisy. This pill can also be MIL-STD-810G examined which signifies that it ought to stand up to falls of round 120cm with out injury.
When it comes to the processor, the Xplore iX125 R1 packs the quickest obtainable cellular mannequin available on the market – even when the Core i7-7500U will very quickly be outmoded by three different fashions, all of which have two-cores and 4MB cache (plus a 15W TDP) and can possible find yourself in rival units.
The 14nm Kaby Lake CPU comes with an Intel HD Graphics 620 GPU clocked at 1.05GHz, supporting 4K at 60Hz (however not by way of HDMI sadly). It’s value noting that this processor doesn’t help vPro in line with Intel, but this pill is vPro suitable.
The system runs Windows 10 Skilled however might be downgraded to Home windows Eight.1 Professional or Home windows 7 Professional (though that route, oddly, solely applies to the Core i5-6200U CPU). The 2 SKUs out there have 8GB of DDR4 system reminiscence and our pattern got here with a 256GB SanDisk M.2 SSD.
Xplore quotes a battery lifetime of greater than 9 hours for the cheaper Core i5-6200U mannequin, based mostly on the bundled battery, with a charging time of two.5 hours when the pill is switched off utterly. We haven’t had the chance to check it.
Early verdict
There’s loads of competitors available on the market from the likes of Panasonic (with the ToughBook series) or Getac (with the RX10 for instance). However the Xplore iX125 R1 is the primary to market with Intel’s seventh-generation CPU, and for that it deserves to be highlighted.
This example gained’t final lengthy, although, as rivals are very more likely to launch their new flagship merchandise at Cellular World Congress 2017, which can happen a couple of weeks from now in Barcelona. It may be a good suggestion to take a look at what else will probably be introduced there.
In any other case, in case you are on the lookout for the quickest potential rugged pill available on the market and don’t need to wait one other quarter, then proper now, the Xplore iX125 R1 is just about the one participant to tick these bins.
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