Staying power for mobile devices

摘要

Forklifts have transformed from mobile spatulas to mobile high-tech offices in just a few years. In a traditional office, any investment in desktop computers is governed by specifications that satisfy operational needs, security concerns and total cost of ownership. When it comes to mobile computers and forklifts, however, many operations have started from scratch and learned the tradeoffs of performance, cost and durability the hard way. "A person looking for a forklift-mounted computer is probably not realizing the true duty cycle," says David Pau-fler, industrial marketing manager for Datalogic. "The biggest blind spot is a lot of people don't realize a forklift has no suspension, so something mounted on it will receive every bump and shock." Paufler says the past few years have seen widespread experiments with consumer-grade devices. Backed up in the Cloud, the semi-disposable nature of consumer devices seemed a viable alternative to rugged, more expensive devices. But, issues of shock damage and connector wear and tear became evident. "They want to use a device for more than one application, so if the operator is only driving for 50% of the day, they want the computer to go with him for the other 50%," Paufler says. "That led them to tablets, which is cool, but they face issues of durability. A wave of iPad users has been coming to us. They're dying with these consumer devices they throw out every six months."