KEY POINTS:
I've liked the idea of ruggedised electronics ever since I was introduced to the Panasonic Toughbook. It's a tough little laptop that can survive falls, being splashed with water and covered in dust.
Check out this story about how a Toughbook survived a roasting in a police car fire.
So I was very interested when Telecom sent me the Sanyo 7050, which the Telecom website tells us features an "ultra-rugged design that adheres to Military Standard 810F for dust, shock and vibration".
Military standard 810F? What's that? Well, according to Wikipedia, it is a series of standards "to specify various environmental tests to prove that equipment qualified to the standard will survive in the field".
So in theory, the Sanyo 7050 is tough enough to be taken into a war zone. Certainly, on first look, it seems like a well-armoured little device with its anti-slip rubber casing which is designed to protect the phone from sudden shocks.
But forget the war zone for a minute. What about the humble Kiwi builder, painter or satellite dish installer who is climbing over people' roofs on a regular basis and likes to keep that phone handy all the time?
I was talking to one dish installer a couple of months ago who lamented the fact he'd recently dropped a mobile phone off a customer's roof. It didn't survive the fall.
The 7050 would seem like a perfect answer to the butter-fingered tradesman. So I decided to do a bit of stress-testing to see how tough it is. The experiment was simple. I'd throw the 7050 out of my second story window, which is about equivalent to the height of a gabled roof on a single story house and see how it looked at the other end.
The "thwack" when the 7050 hit the ground gave me a bit of a surprise, but safe in the knowledge that the phone I'd just biffed conformed to "Military Standard 810F" I ran down the stairs to retrieve it.
Unfortunately, as the above photo shows, the 7050 didn't survive the fall unscathed. The external LCD, which displays in colour the time, battery level and incoming call ID, smashed. In every other sense, apart from some scratching on its front, the 7050 came out okay. The internal screen was undamaged, the phones numerous features from Bluetooth to speakerphone still function normally.
Not a terrible result it was just that front LCD that let the 7050 down. But the test reveals the one major vulnerability the front LCD isn't properly shielded from shock. The phone landed on its front in my test so the LCD took the brunt of the impact.
But the rubber that blankets most of the phone doesn't buttress the front of the phone sufficiently it was plastic on concrete when the phone hit the ground.
That's a shame because in every other sense, the 7050 is pretty good. It has push-to-talk, the walkie-talkie service which is apparently popular with builders, has a really good speaker phone, can receive email and has exceptional battery life.
Sanyo's phones like the 7400 have always been the stand-outs in Telecom's underwhelming handset line-up. The 7050 almost upholds that tradition but isn't nearly as rugged as claimed. After all, who wants a phone with a broken front LCD?
Price: $399
www.telecom.co.nz
