Xplore Technologies® Corp just announced the iX104C3 Ruggedized Tablet PC. Layne, a high school biology teacher, offers a useful hardware overview.
All Xplore products have durable magnesium alloy housings, shock mounted hard drives, enhanced XGA displays, fast Intel processors and onboard ports for expansion. They are built to function in physically demanding real-world environments and will withstand exposure to vibration, extreme temperatures, moisture, dust or drops to concrete.
Professors conducting field studies may find this upgraded case extends your confidence in using a Tablet PC in harsh environments.
Teachers who conduct summer camps for budding scientists, equestrian explorers, musicians, etc. may want to pack along a ruggedized Tablet PC to use its many (100+?)features for collecting data.
I wonder if I can convince my brother to take one with him when he returns to the Alaskan bush hunting lodge for the winter? The lodge is 120 nautical miles north of Anchorage. It’s a station on the Iditarod and Iron Dog race trail.
He tells me that 500 varieties of mosquitoes live in Alaska. Many mosquitoes near the lodge as well as bears, elk, moose, birds, and varments call it home as well as 13 domesticated horses that winter outside.
He already reports weather every hour to the weather bureau in addition to keeping the 11 buildings unfrozen and feeding horses and an almost steady stream of guests traveling through this frozen region.
Would anyone use reports from him and his Tablet PC in your classroom or research? What would you and your students want to learn about Alaska?
Would you want a webcame online feed of the lake? Or maybe of changing objects appearing in a fixed focus location for six months?
You get the idea. Anyone interested?
(Sidebar: He knows how to collect scientific and other objective data. Before he retired, he ran dairies milking a total of 25,000 cows a day plus managing about 500 nursing and sick cows a day plus calves. (Each milking cow produced a calf!) Over two decades ago, he collected daily event logs on each cow. He knew how to change feed of an individual cow in order to increase her butter fat content in her milk. I marvel at how more advanced dairies have operated compared with the databases educators use to increase learning in schools. It kinda frosts me, too, that we knowingly lag so far behind agribusinesses.)