Recommendation to buy a Rugged laptop / tablet pc

[CESARJIMENEZ]

Hi everyone
My name is Cesar, I´m a doctoral student in the topic of habitat modeling and It would be great is someone can recommend me about buying a new rugged laptop for fieldwork.
Mainly I need the laptop to work with ArcPad, drawing polygons over Digital ortophotos.
The laptop I was working with is iX104C (xplore) but we want to buy another one because of the durability of the batteries (an the weight). We think that perhaps nowadays there is a tablet (much comfortable) with similar properties, and also waterproof and screen resistant to falls.
The main properties needed are:
- Waterproof
- Resistant screen
- 6-10 hours duration batteries
- Notebook size (25x10 or more)
- Windows
- 4 RAM
I was checking in the internet and I´ve found some, but a bit expensive. For example, Motion´s CL900 (http://www.motioncomputing.co.uk/products/tablet_pc_CL900.asp). Do you think it is possible to find something similar but cheaper?
Which field laptop are you working with?
I hope someone could help me, I am really lost
Thanks so much, keep in touch
César

[noamrozenfeld]

Hi,
Did you get any reply?
I'm looking also for tablets that can run ArcGIS.

[WillLentz]

Ceasar,

Sorry I didn't see this post sooner.

For the price, this looks like a great Windows OS device. This year I paid more like £300 for a rugged tablet. Did you end up getting a CL900 and if so, how is its performance?

We have started using Android tablets in the field. Much better price point but no ESRI solution to take data offline yet. They expect to have that available in the next 6 months or so, it would be exciting to see. To replace entering data on paper forms we bought Pantech Element tablets - waterproof but not rugged and very reasonable at about half the price of the CL900.  We put them in a nice folio case and asked our users to take care of them. So far, so good. Hoping to do some mapping on them next season.

Will
Fairbanks AK