Motorola ES400; A Convergence of Consumer Technology in a Rugged Enterprise Housing.

Posted on 28 June 2010

Motorola have launched the much anticipated ES400 Enterprise Digital Assistant (EDA) targetted at the mobile worker that may have looked at utilising consumer orientated SmartPhones.

The ES400 boasts a drop specification which meets US Military requirements for ruggedness, surviving 300 consecutive 0.5m drops and is also resilient to; end exposure to dust, moisture and rain. This level of ruggedness is important, but many Codegate customers have reported that a product road map and life cycle of over three years is equally important. Motorola say they will continue to develop the ES400 for three years, enabling companies to plan full corporate wide roll-outs with confidance in the products availability in the future.

This fully featured, light weight device (<200 gms) has an impressive array of attributes, including:

• 600 MHz ARM processor
• 257MB RAM with 1GB Flash and micro SD card supporting up to 32GB
• 3 inch colour touch screen VGA 640×480 display
• Built-in biometric fingerprint reader
• 3.2MB autofocus digital colour camera
• Global Positioning Satellite (GPS) system
• 1d and 2d bar code scanning using controllable ‘Red line’ aimer
• 3-axis accelerometer enabling motion sensing and screen orientation
• Up to 500 stand by and 12 hours talk time using the extended battery
• 802.11 a/b/g direct sequence wireless LAN
• Dual 3.5G, GSM HSDPA/HSUPA plus Bluetooth V2.0 and Voice-over IP ready

In short, the ES400 has everything the mobile worker could desire from GPS navigation to sign-on glass signature capture, bar code data capture to high speed communications over the cellular network, allowing you to report data back to the office based ERP system. This device ticks a lot of the boxes listed by our customers as being key for mobile worker solutions.

I see the ES400 as having a bright future. Motorola have finally reaped the benefits of combining the scale of consumer electronics manufacturing with the application knowledge of the rugged data capture market experience of their previous acquisition – Symbol Technologies. Codegate are already receiving requests to port software to the ES400 and we expect many more customers to follow.

Will the ES400 work for you or is the screen/keyboard too small? Do you see this as a attractive mobile worker tool or will it be too attractive to technology theives? Let me know…