Emdoor was founded in 2002 as a designer and manufacturer of rugged handhelds, tablets, notebooks, PCs, and vehicle mount computers, as well as a provider of customized hardware and software solutions. Even today, Emdoor doesn't sell products under its own brand name, although that may happen at some point in the future. For now Emdoor is one of the largest and most experienced Chinese providers of rugged computing systems and serves as an ODM or OEM partner to many Tier One companies.

Emdoor Info has its headquarter and a factory in Shenzhen, and also an R&D team of over 300 people. They can produce 15,000 to 30,000 rugged devices a month, and currently have a roster of about 50 rugged mobile products. Emdoor's goal is to provide cost-efficient industrial hardware and sometimes also software solutions for use in warehouse logistics, industrial automation, health care, petroleum exploration, outdoor mapping, automotive inspection, road enforcement, education, border patrol, retail services, self-service terminals, machine vision, smart home, intelligent transportation, and the like.

Today's marketplace is a global one, and producing everything in one location is generally no longer feasible. There are, of course, exceptions, but for the most part components are procured from all kinds of places and assembled in various locations, all depending on cost, logistics and profitability. This dynamic gave rise to the formation of OEMs — Original Equipment Manufacturers — and ODMs — Original Design Manufactures. OEMs make a product per the exact design and specifications of the company that ultimately sells the product with its name on it. ODMs design and manufacture a product entirely by themselves. and then sell the product to companies who put their name and brand on it.

What roles are OEMs and ODMs playing today? Very important ones. Almost all consumer electronics products today are no longer manufactured by the companies most people think make them. Few who are not industry insiders, for example, have heard of Hon Hai Precision Industry. Better known as Foxconn, Hoi Han had 2020 revenues of US$181 billion. That's way more than the annual revenues of Microsoft, HP, IBM or Dell.

What's the impact of this on the rugged mobile computing market? At this point a large variety of rugged handhelds, tablets, laptops and panel PCs are made by OEMs and ODMs, and then sold under names familiar to end users and local may be structured in many different forms. An OEM may manufacture a product line to very precise specifications for one customer only, and that customer may have an exclusive to the line. Such products are then only available from only one single company, in essence making them a "virtual manufacturer." It is, however, also common that an ODM creates a product and then sells that exact product to several customers. Those customers may then put their label on it and nothing more. Between those two extremes are many shades of gray.

Hoes does all of that apply to Emdoor Info and the EM-T60 rugged Android handheld? Emdoor is both an ODM and an OEM, and one that specializes in making rugged computing products. Emdoor's customers are companies that provide rugged technology to their own end user customers. The rugged computing market is, of course, way smaller than the consumer technology market, and Emdoor is much smaller than Foxconn (which gets about half of its revenue from Apple). But it's basically the same thing.

While many customers like doing business with one of the major rugged hardware and services brands, for others working with an OEM/ODM like Emdoor makes more sense. As an OEM/ODM, companies like Emdoor can offer cost advantaged. OEM/ODM designs are more easily customizable to meet the needs of different customers, including personalizing products with established labels, color schemes, and materials. OEM/ODMs are also more likely to offer a large variety of I/O and they may support different technologies, standards, and performance levels.

So let's look at the EM-T60 and see how the company went about the difficult job of creating a rugged Android handheld that merges the look and appeal of a generic modern smartphone form factor with the toughness and functionality of a handheld computer for the job. Below you can see the EM-T60 from the front, from all four sides, and from the back.

Emdoor clearly came up with an attractive design that brings ruggedness to the ubiquitous form factor of the immensely popular modern smartphone with its slender rectangle, subtly rounded corners and flush glass. It added ruggedness with a strong metallic body that adds protection to the slightly recessed display. The overall effect is that from the ET60 looks exactly like a modern smartphone in a protective sleeve. But since this is the body and not just a sleeve, Emdoor could also give the device a nicely styled backside. In a world where almost every smartphone looks pretty much the same, this Emdoor design manages to look subtly different and more elegant.

The EM-T60 has a footprint of 6.3 x 3.15 inches, almost exactly the same of an Apple iPhone 13 Pro Max. This being a very rugged device with an integrated industrial grade barcode scanner the ET60 is thicker, but comparing the iPhone 13 Pro Max in its standard Apple Silicone case you can barely tell. Weightwise, the iPhone 13 Pro Max in the sleeve weighs 9.2 ounces, the EM-T60 9.5 ounces. Quite amazing, especially given that the Emdoor actually has a bigger battery than Apple's finest.

Since the Emdoor EM-T60 doesn't need a case to handle everyday work and life, all of its buttons and controls are easily accessible. On the left side that's the volume up/down buttons (you can assign other functions to them), an orange scanner button, and the memory card and SIM card slot. On the right side is another orange scanner button, the on/off button, and a programmable button.

When it comes to rugged mobile computers — be they handhelds, tablets or laptops — the inside matters as much or more than the outside. A strong chassis and the absence of components that may come loose are all essential for the durability and ruggedness of a device. And that is why we generally disassemble test devices in our lab. With the EM-T60 we are not doing that, because in this aspect, it is more like a modern smartphone than a handheld computer. Other than pry out the display like one has to do with an iPhone, we saw no discernible way to take the T60 apart.

And the EM-T60 is like a modern smartphone in another respect as well: the battery is internal. The good news of that is that there isn't a battery compartment that must carefully be sealed to keep liquids out. The not so good news is that you can't just pop in a freshly charged battery is power runs out halfway through a shift (fortunately, the EM-T60's big battery makes that unlikely).

Lacking an accessible battery compartment, which is where most industria handhelds have their card slots, the T60's cards are placed on a small caddy that is then pushed into the device from the side and protected by a tight-fitting plug. That caddy can either accommodate a nano-SIM card and a micro-SD card, or the same caddy can also host two nano-SIM cards.

OEM companies like Emdoor must carefully plan the overall performance levels of their mobile computing product offerings. In addition to the usual size/weight/cost tradeoffs and balancing inherent in any mobile design, OEM customers may have widely differing priorities, ranging from lowest possible cost to highest possible performance. That conundrum is relatively easily addressed in Windows tablets or laptops that may be available with a wide range of processors of difference performance levels, that option isn't available with handheld computers. Each model comes with its own chip, and OEMs must choose that one carefully.

Performance	Emdoor Info
Model (version tested)	EM-T60
Year tested	2021
Processor	MediaTek
Processor Model	MT6762
CPU Speed	2.00/1.50 GHz
Cores	Octa-core
AnTuTu	95,380
PC Mark Work 3	4,971
- PC Mark Browsing	5,074
- PC Mark Video Editing	4,256
- PC Mark Writing	4,310
- PC Mark Photo Editing	8,901
- PC Mark Data Manipulation	3,664
Geekbench 5 Single Core	152
Geekbench 5 Multi Core	934
Geekbench 5 Vulkan	73

Everyone, of course, loves the kind of effortless responsiveness that makes modern smartphones so easy and pleasant to use, and the performance that won't slow things down even when running demanding apps. All smartphones look pretty much the same, and that's why consumer smartphone makers seek to differentiate themselves from the competition with new and faster chips each year, as well as better cameras, more memory and so on. All that comes at a price that not everyone can pay. And price is definitely a big issue in OEM designs.

The latest top-of-the-line SoCs (System-on-Chips) are way too expensive to be feasible for most OEM devices, and so OEMs will/must select SOCs that are fast enough to get the job done at a low enough cost to be financially feasible for the OEM, the OEM's customers, and the end user.

What Emdoor did with the EM-ET60 is use an octa-core SoC from MediaTek. While not as well known as Qualcomm and its SnapDragon chips that are in most high-end Android phones, MediaTek is actually the world's largest smartphone application processor supplier.

The Helio P22 MT6762 Emdoor chose uses eight Cortex A53 cores, four running at up to 2.0GHz and the other four at up to 1.5GHz. The idea here is speed when needed, and economic operation when maximum speed doesn't matter. The SoC includes a 600MHz PowerVR GE8320 and also controls other important system functions. It is a popular chip used in many devices by most leading smartphone makers.

It is, however, not the latest and greatest. The Helio P22 was introduced almost four years ago and it definitely gets the job done. But the emphasis here is in a balance between cost and performance that works for OEMs and OEM customers.

The table above shows the EM-T60's performance in some of the leading Android benchmark test suites. Overall, it performed at the level of SnapDragon SD450-based devices, which is very respectable for an OEM device. Compared to relatively recent popular higher end models based on the SD855 we saw roughly half the PCMark 10 Works 3.0 performance.

What kind of battery life can one expect from the Emdoor EM-T60 rugged handheld? Emdoor claims seven hours from a charge of its 3.8 Volt, 5,000mAH, 19 watt-hour battery. Battery life, of course, is very relative and depends on how a device is used. The screen captures below show both the results of the EM-60T's performance in PCMark for Android's Work 3.0 performance score as well as how it did in PCMark for Android's Work 3.0 battery life test and rundown.

PCMark for Android's Work 3.0 test consists of running a long list of everyday tasks, the kind of work a user may encounter while using the device for daily work. The battery life test keeps running that suite until the battery is exhausted, without turning the device ever going to sleep (we calibrated the system to operate at PCMark's recommended 200 nits luminance). In that test, the EM-T60 exceeded Emdoor's own seven hour estimate by a full five hours. The EM-ET60 ran for 11 hours and 57 minutes, never stopping work. Almost no one uses their handhelds constantly for 12 hours, so real life battery life may well be higher yet. That is excellent.

And yet, the vast majority of smartphones sold today have screens larger than 5.5 inches. Which means the EM-60T's 5.7-inch fits right in. Rugged industrial and enterprise handhelds usually have somewhat smaller screens due to their larger bezels that provide extra protection.

The Emdoor EM-T60s capacitive multi-touch IPS display has 720 x 1440 pixel resolution. That makes for 282 pixels per inch. That is very sharp and definitely falls into what Apple calls the "retina" category, i.e. it's so sharp that you can't see indvidual pixels. There are consumer smartphones now with wel over 600 ppi, but that seems a marketing issue much more than a need. Since this is an IPS screen, there are perfect viewing angles and no color or contrast shifts when viewed from any angle.

Display brightness is very important for easy viewability outdoors. No current display can, of course, match direct sunlight, but display technology has advanced to a level where we can expect good outdoor viewability under most conditions, and the EM-T60 is no exception.

What makes a display appear bright is its luminance, and that is usually measured in "nits." Nits is actually candela per meter squared, or cd/m2, and that, per Google dictionary, is "the luminous intensity, in a given direction, of a source that emits monochromatic radiation of frequency 540 × 1012 Hz and has a radiant intensity in that direction of 1/683 watt per steradian." Whew. No wonder they just call it nits.

Emdoor's spec sheet claims 430 nits for the EM-T60 display. Premium consumer tablets and smartphones can go as high as 500 and 600 nits, so 430 seemed a bit low. In our testing we found the EM-T60 display to actually be a good bit brighter than its listed 430 nits — our test equipment measured 530 nits.

Like almost all smartphone and tablet displays today, the EM-T60 has a "glossy" transmissive screen with optical treatments to offer as much outdoor viewability as possible. Glossy screens "pop" and make for vibrant displays, but outdoors it all depends on angle and reflections. The pictures below show the handheld outdoors on a bright late morning under various viewing conditions. In shaded areas it's bright and very readable. Like in all devices using glossy screens, there will be reflections that dim the screen some.

Overall, the EM-T60 display is very good. It's bright and vibrant indoors, and bright enough for outdoor use. It offers near perfect viewing angles from all directions, without distracting changes in brightness, color, or contrast.

The EM-T60 comes standard with a Honeywell N6703 1D/2D imager shown on the right (see N670x info). It's a tiny module, measuring just 0.27 x 0.93 x 0.64 inches and weighing barely more than a tenth of an ounce. The N6703 has a red aiming LED crosshair and can handle anything from total darkness to bright sunlight. It's fast enough to capture virtually any 1D or 2D bar code in milliseconds.

The included Android Camera app in our review unit could take pictures with resolutions as high as 16mp (4608 x 3456 pixels), also also offered four additional resolutions from 3mp to 12mp in 4:3 and 16:9 aspect ratios. Settings are limited to image size, self timer, white balance and anti-flicker.

In video mode, the there are four resolutions, topping out at 1920 x 1080. 4K video would have been nice; the imager could easily support it. There are numerous scene modes, digital image stabilization, anti-flicker and microphone-on /off. Video quality is good, but many will miss higher resolution modes.

Android camera apps usually offer plenty of features, but this one didn't. Maybe that's because our eval unit used the open source Android AOSP (Emdoor also offers the device with Android GMS).

The pictures below were shot with the EM-T60's rear camera in 12mp 4608 x 2592 mode. Click on the image to bring up a full-size version.

Unlike modern smartphones that pretty much need a protective case to survive, the EM-T60 doesn't need a case and it can be used without worries that it might break or get scratched or dented. There is no need from a screen protector because the screen glass is thick and strong enough (Emdoor's website shows cars driving over their rugged handhelds). There's no gleaming metal or plastic trim that easily scratches or breaks off.

By established ruggedness testing standards, just how tough is this tablet? That's a bit more difficult to determine. The EM-T60 carries IP67 sealing where the "6" means it's completely dustproof, and the "7" that it is also protected against leaking/damage from full emersion in water. So no worries about dropping it in a puddle or even pool, let alone just a spilling a soda on it or a bit of rain. As the image below shows, we took that to the test.

The EM-T60 can also handle drops from four feet. That means it can easily survive falling off a desk or a cart. And four feet is also about the distance a tablet falls if it slips out of one's hands while using it in a standing position.

The stated operating temperature range of -4 to 122 degrees Fahrenheit (-20 to 50 degrees Celsius) is wide enough for just about any deployment short of extended use in commercial freezers or arctic settings.

A couple of comments here: unlike the boasting we see in so many promotional materials, Emdoor seems almost too conservative. In pur testing the EM-T60 had much longer battery life than Emdoor claimed. Likewise, we think the 4-foot drop and IP67 claims are conservative. And, it'd be nice if Emdoor included ALL ruggedness testing results in its specs.

The pictures below show some of the test procedures all Emdoor rugged products must go through. These include, in no particular order, waterproofing and air tightness, high and low temperature, salt spray corrosion, bare metal drop test, roller test, impact resistance, vibration resistance, screen ball drop, protective door testing, friction testing, static testing, color testing, chemicals and rub-down testing, and more.

The EM-T60 has a footprint no larger than that of an iPhone 13 Pro Max, and barely weighs more than the iPhone in a silicone sleeve. Yet, the EM-T60 is much tougher than any modern smartphone. It's 5.7-inch 720 x 1440 pixel IPS display is bright (530 nits in our testing) and has excellent viewing angles.

The device is available with industrial-grade 1D/2D barcode scanners from Honeywell and Zebra. It has an excellent 13mp front camera for video calls and conferencing. The 16mp documentation camera is also considerably better than most cameras found in rugged handhelds. The 19 watt-hour internal battery can easily make it through even an extended shift.

The unit's octa-core MediaTek MT6762 SoC provides decent performance, but is not at the level of the latest premium consumer smartphones. WiFi, Bluetooth, NFC and GPS are all standard; mobile broadband is optionally available. The device has a card caddy for either a nano-SIM and a micro SD card, or two nano-SIM cards.

Overall, the EM-T60 is an exceptionally polished and competent option for OEM customers who seek an attractive handheld that combines the modern smartphone look with industrial handheld ruggedness and features. -- Conrad H. Blickenstorfer, November 2021

Emdoor EM-T60 Specs

		Available options
Added/changed	Full review 11/2021
Type	Rugged OEM Handheld
Processor	Octa-core MediaTek Helio P22 MT6762 (4 x Cortex A53 2.0GHz, 4 x Cortex A53 1.5GHz)	NA
Graphics	PowerVR GE8320 (600MHz)	NA
OS	Android 10 GMS	Android 10 AOSP
Standard/Max RAM	4GB LPDDR3	NA
Disk/drive	64GB eMMC solid state disk
Display type	IPS TFT LCD, 430 nits (530 nits measured)
Display size/resolution	5.7" 720 x 1440 pixel (282 pixels per inch)
Digitizer	Capacitive 5-point multi-touch, Corning Gorilla Glass 3	NA
Keyboard/keys	Power, volume up/down, 2 x scanner key, 1 x programmable	NA
Navigation	Touch	NA
Expansion slots	1 x micro SDXC (up to 128GB), 1 x nano SIM OR 2 x nano SIM	NA
Housing	ABS+PC	NA
Housing color	Black front and rear
Size	6.3 x 3.15 x 0.65 inches (160 x 80 x 16 mm)	NA
Weight	9.2 ounces pounds (260 grams)	NA
Operating temperature	-14° to 122°F (-10° to 60°C)	NA
Ingress protection	IP67 (totally dustproof, can handle full immersion to about 1 meter)	NA
Humidity	95% non-condensing	NA
Drop	4-foot drops per MIL-STD-810G	NA
Vibration	Est: MIL-STD-810G, Method 514,6, Procedure I, Category 4 and 20	NA
ESD	Est: Connect ±8KV for all metal outside. Air ±15KV for all metal outside and touch panel.	NA
Power	Interna 3.8V, 5,000mAH, 19 watt-hour rechargeable Li-Ion Polymer battery	NA
Camera	Front: 13.1-megapixel; rear: 16-megapixel AF	NA
GPS	Integrated GNSS (GPS, GLONASS, Beidou, Galileo	NA
Barcode reader	Honeywell 6703	Zebra SE4710
NFC	Yes	NA
Sensors	Ambient light, G-sensor, gyro, e-compass	NA
WiFi	802.11a/b/g/n/ac	NA
Bluetooth	BT 5.0 BLE	NA
WWAN 3G/4G	none	GSM 2/3/5/8 WCDMA 1/2/4/5/8 TDD B38/B40/B41 FDD B1/ B2/ B3/ B4/ B5/ B7/ B8/ B12/ B13/ B17/ B19/ B20/ B28A/ B28B/ B18/ B25/ B26/ B66
Audio	USB Type-C, dual speakers	NA
Dock	Via USB Type-C	NA
USB	1 x USB Type-C	NA
Price	Inquire
Regulatory	FCC, IATA, ROHS
Spec sheet	Emdoor EM-T60 spec sheet (PDF)
Web page	Emdoor EM-T60 web
Contact	Emdoor Shenzen Headquarter 3/F, 5th Boulevard, Wonderful Life Wisdom Valley Technology Park No. 83 Daobao Road, Bao'an District Shenzhen City, China Tel: +86-(0)755-2372 2880 Cell: +86-18128844520 www.emdoorrugged.com marketing.info @ emdoor.com