Today we’re proud to announce the immediate availability of our all-new fully-rugged tablet, the Latitude 7212 Rugged Extreme. This evolution of our acclaimed Latitude 7202 rugged tablet brings a balanced mix of forward-looking performance and features, while preserving the backwards-compatibility that we have promised our customers.

For field service professionals, law enforcement, military, and utility workers world-wide, we are bringing to market a durable and reliable product that integrates seamlessly into existing enterprise-class IT infrastructures, with no-hassle manageability and end to end security backed by the best supply chain and most comprehensive support program in the market.

Lightweight, Powerful, and Secure

The Latitude 7212 Rugged Extreme Tablet delivers up to several times more CPU performance than the previous generation¹, thanks to 7^th Generation Core i-series processors. Even with this substantial boost in performance, the tablet manages to improve battery life by 29 percent over its predecessor². Best of all, we managed to shave over half a pound off the design during the process. Additional notable improvements include a FHD 1920x1080p etched Gorilla Glass screen with 10-point glove-touch ability and superior direct sunlight readability, USB 3 Type-C connectivity for one-wire docking and charging, and new and superior accessories.

Customer-Focused Design and Support

You might notice that we don’t have a wide variety of rugged products, and that we don’t update them as quickly as we may some of our other products. That’s on purpose. The rugged market is unique in several ways, and one of the ways is in what exactly our customers demand of us. Our customers want product longevity and forwards and backwards compatibility. We have customers that have asked to purchase models that are 5 years old or more! These customers make significant investments in not just the devices themselves, but the accessory ecosystem as well. That means that moving ports, changing the physical design, or any host of other design choices may mean that you break conformity or continuity with docks and other products that can cost several hundreds of dollars. That can drastically increase your expenses when trying to modernize your technology. To that end, we make sure that we stretch compatibility as long as possible as we iterate on our products, and that we ensure that we only introduce new products when there is clear market demand. Our Rugged portfolio is available with ProSupport Plus with SupportAssist, a monitored, predictive service that helps identify problems and increase uptime, all while minimizing steps and time to get you back up and running should problems occur.

Test To Fail

One thing that you’ll find about Dell Rugged is that we are always happy to talk about failure. In fact, we push our designs to the breaking point, and then we figure out how to make them better. That’s “testing to fail” – we go beyond just baseline industry specifications and try to find the true limits of our products, because we know that our customers’ experiences don’t fit squarely into a check box. Anytime we can offer that additional margin in durability may mean more than we can know to someone who depends on these products every day. Check out this video tour of our Rugged Lebs to learn about what we mean when we say “test to fail.”

Leveraging Dell’s Engineering Strengths

In the world-wide market for computers, hardened compute devices are no-where near the largest segment. Because Dell designs and manufactures all types of devices for a wide-range of customers, there are certain advantages we can bring to the table when designing Dell Rugged products. Dell has a unified engineering team; all engineering teams within client computing report up to Senior Vice President of Engineering Ed Ward. He and his team collaborate at all levels across the business to bubble up best practices, lessons learned, and other knowledge that can be shared between team members to enhance the overall strength of our product portfolio. This may be in the shape of one of our larger volume product lines sharing reliability data with our Rugged team for commodity parts like hard drives, memory, and other shared electrical components, while Rugged may help others with various material science advancements and durability practices that lead to better hinges, more durable keyboards, and more scratch-proof displays across the entire line of laptops we offer. This collaboration brings cumulative and critical improvements that wouldn’t be otherwise possible.

Battle-Tested in Real World Conditions

Recently Dell Rugged products were put through a gauntlet of testing with the British Army in some of the most demanding conditions. See the results and hear about their experiences in this video.

¹ Based on Sysmark 2014, PCMark, and Cinebench testing

² Based on MobileMark 2014 results, configured with 52Wh total capacity