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Harris new rugged tablet brings Honeycomb to your local combat-zone
Harris makes the tough tech you'd expect to see census takers (leave it), NFL stadiums and public buses toting around. It's introducing a new 7-inch Android tablet that's so hard-as-nails it would make a Galaxy Tab go home and call its mother. The Harris RF-3590 packs a 1024 x 600 multitouch display, a dual-core 1.5GHz CPU, 2GB of LPDDR2 RAM, 2 and 8-megapixel front and rear-facing cameras and comes running Honeycomb. There's plenty of connection options with the usual WiFi, GPS and Bluetooth supplanted by a cellular connection, Ethernet, HDMI, SD and USB holes. It'll come with a 64GB SSD as standard but you can upgrade it to 128GB if you've got the moolah. Designed for soldiers in the battlefield, when stealth isn't necessary you can even activate voice control and bark your orders into the pair of microphones included. There's no word on pricing or availability, presumably because if you want to pick one of these up, you probably need to be called "General," and not just because you're good at Starcraft.[Thanks, Mike]
KnightHawk 3G network-in-a-box breaks soldiers' backs, helps them get online anywhere
While it's easy enough to envision soldiers scaling battlegrounds with portable hotspots in tow, it's a useless solution for warriors deployed to remote areas that have patchy service to begin with. Enter the KnightHawk 3G, a rugged network-in-a-box that cooks up connectivity in otherwise uncovered areas. The self-contained WCDMA network runs over the 2100MHz spectrum, promising download speeds as fast as 14.4mbps and max upload rates of 5.76mbps. It has capacity for up to 60 simultaneous voice calls and can handle 14 HSPA connections at a time. And it'll help keep our troops in top shape -- you can't tell from the photos, but that thing weighs 45 pounds. %Gallery-121824%
Raleigh, North Carolina buses get on-board DTV
Planning to hop on a bus in Raleigh, North Carolina anytime soon? Then there's a chance you could be treated to an added distraction during your trip, as the city has just rolled out its first CAT bus equipped with mobile DTV, which looks to be one of the first projects resulting from those MPH tests that took place last year. This little bit of magic also comes courtesy of a little help from LG and Harris Corp., who are supplying the displays and mobile transmission equipment for the pilot program, which will be expanded to five buses by August, with another 20 planned for the second phase that'll run though August 2010. Of course, your viewing options will be somewhat limited, with a simulcast of local station WRAL apparently the only channel on tap, along with some weather information and, of course, a healthy dose of advertising. [Thanks, Dana]
Census employee discusses the HTC smartphone deployment
While there was certainly celebrating to be done in Taipei, Redmond, and Melbourne, FL upon the Census Bureau's announcement that Harris Corp. had won a contract to supply its pollsters with half a million Windows Mobile-powered HTC smartphones, some regular taxpayers were likely left wondering why it was necessary to add $600 million to a 2010 census budget that already tops $11 billion. Luckily for the majority of us who were kept out of the loop during this decision-making process, Computerworld has an interview with the Bureau's field data collection project manager, Edwin B. Wagner Jr., who sheds a little bit of light (though not much) on the rationale behind equipping data collectors, who already sport Blackberries, with yet another device. Wagner claims that the smartphones will save the Bureau both time (keeping workers abreast of mailed-in returns so they don't go on unnecessary home visits) and money (due to the amount of paper saved, although last time we checked, you could get a whole ream of the white stuff for less than the lowest-end HTC product), along with providing more accurate census results by reducing the number of times data needs to be manually transferred. He also goes into a bit of detail (though again, not much) on why they went with WinMo over other OSes, and hints that the phones may be enabled for limited voice use after all, so hit the Read link for the full scoop.
