• The new Mesa 4 still has a 7-inch screen, though smartphones are now pushing into that size class as well. The Mesa 4's 1280 x 800 pixel resolution makes for a sharp image on a 7-inch screen, not in the premium smartphone range but very respectable with 216 ppi. 216 ppi is actually much sharper than the common "Full HD" desktop monitor, and also sharper than even a 4k 27-inch desktop monitor.

  

• The Mesa 4, of course, comes with capacitive multi-touch, like virtually all handhelds and tablets today. Everyone has gotten so used to the technology's convenient tapping, panning, pinching and zooming that there's really no alternative. Capacitive touch on a small screen, though, still is a bit of a challenge on Windows, but Windows 11 has improved in that regard. The Mesa 3 comes with a decent narrow-tip (3mm) stylus, and, when in the office, it's easy to hook it up with a wireless mouse.

• The biggest difference between the Mesa 4 and its (still available) Mesa 3 predecessor (the two look virtually identical) is a substantially more powerful processor. And also a USB-C port. Having a 100% chance that you're trying to plug in a connector the right way instead of just a 50% chance with the old Type-A standard alone may be worth the price of admission to the new model.

• The Mesa 4's beefy tablet-sized housing allows for a lot of battery power. The standard 43.2 watt-hour intelligent Lithium-Ion pack is good for a full 8-hour shift. An optional internal second 21.6 watt-hour battery boosts that to more like 12 hours.

• The Mesa 4 has a wide operating temperature range of -4 to 122 degrees Fahrenheit. While not quite as extreme as that of the company's Archer 3 rugged handheld (which can go as low as -22 degrees Fahrenheit and as high as 140 degrees), this makes the Mesa 4 suitable for deployment in just about any environmental setting, even freezers.

• As far as drop resistance goes, the Mesa 4 survives multiple drops from four feet onto concrete. That's again a bit less than the super-rugged Archer 3, but remarkable considering that the Mesa 4 is a bigger, heavier device. And four feet is the distance a tablet would drop when in mobile use, so that makes sense.

  For ingress protection, the Mesa 4 scores a perfect IP68. That's as high as it gets. The first number stands for protection against solids. 6 means the unit is totally protected against the finest dust. The second number is for the degree of protection from liquids. That scale goes from 0 (no protection) to 8 (totally immune to water, even extended immersion). The Mesa 4 is one of the very few rugged tablet platforms we know of with a certified IP68 rating (Juniper tested at 1.4 meters for two hours). And it's protected even while ports are in use! Now THAT's impressive!

• As is Juniper's custom, the Mesa 4 is available as a standard model and also a Barcode model, a GEO model, and an RFID model. All can accommodate Class 1.5 Bluetooth 5.3 with enhanced data rate, dual-band WiFi 6E, and 4G LTE multi-carrier radio.

The Mesa 4 positioning

The Mesa platform started as a handheld, but it was also more than a handheld. Juniper initially called it the "world's first rugged notepad," and described the Mesa as a device designed to offer the advantages of both a Tablet PC and a rugged handheld, but without the disadvantages of either.

The first Mesa had a 5.7-inch screen, much larger than the rugged handhelds of the era. In many ways, the original Mesa seemed patterned after the "Ultra-Mobile PC" concept Microsoft had once proposed, a full computer that was small, mobile, ran the full Windows operating system, but could also go anywhere and do anything a desktop or a big laptop could do.

While the original first generation Mesa with its 5.7-inch display was somewhere between a handheld and a small tablet (Juniper called it a "rugged notepad"), the Mesa 4 clearly is in the small tablet category. Given the ever larger smartphone screens, not so much by the size of its 7-inch display, but by its overall design, size, and features.

Materials, colors and design are trademark Juniper — light-gray ABS plastic with orange bumpers (Juniper also offers custom colors for the corner guards). Unlike the Mesa 3 which didn't even have a Juniper logo, the new Mesa 4 does, which is good business.

When the original Juniper Mesa platform first appeared, it was a hefty piece of equipment with an imposing magnesium housing and large, prominent protective orange end caps, just like Juniper's handhelds had. The 2nd generation Mesa, from the start, was a more modern and more conventional tablet design, one where form very much followed function. And that didn't change with the Mesa 3 and now Mesa 4. It's simply a design that works.

As far as that design goes, rather than completely relying on touch, Juniper felt that adding physical control tabs makes for easiest-possible operation. Unlike traditional buttons, the Mesa's tabs are slightly concave and you can easily feel with your finger when you're on a button without even looking at the device. And perhaps these physical tabs that also include a directional diamond initially represented a comforting link to the past where all handheld computers had that central navigation diamond and then function buttons to the left and right of it. Even all those years later they sometimes still come in handy.

Whereas almost all consumer tablets have all-glass fronts (which makes it pretty much mandatory to put them in a protective case), as a rugged device the Mesa 4 adds protection with a housing that is slightly raised around the perimeter. But since you don't want a tall, blocky perimeter around a capacitive multi-touch display for your fingers to bop into, Juniper kept the elevation of the protective perimeter at a minimum and made it sloped. Your fingers feel that border, but it won't affect touch operation.

That said, procap displays benefit from having smooth glass go well beyond the perimeter of the actual LCD so you can easily pinch and zoom near the border of the display. Here we'd have liked to see a bit more than the roughly 1/8th inch of extra glass past the LCD before the finger runs into the plastic bezel.

Like most ultra-rugged and tightly sealed devices, the Mesa 4 has just the necessary minimum of I/O openings. Going around the unit, the left side of the device features a surface-mount docking connector, and the bottom the power jack, a standard USB 3.1 Type-A port, and, new for the Mesa 4, a USB Type-C port. And there is a storage slot for the stylus. Other than two hand strap attachment points on each long side, that's it.

So let's take a look at the Mesa 4 construction and how it all fits together. The image below shows the backside of the tablet first as is (on the left), with the battery compartment cover removed (in the middle), and then with the battery removed as well (on the right).

Sealing of the battery compartment is via its plastic cover whose hard plastic lip presses against a replaceable rubber ribbon o-ring seal around the perimeter of the compartment. That seal sits loosely in its groove, so make sure it's seated properly whenever you open and close the battery compartment. The cover locks into place via a spring-loaded lever. It is not likely that the battery will ever be released accidentally. The Li-Ion battery of the Mesa 4, sourced from Excell Battery Company, is a square block measuring roughly 2.9 x 2.9 inches and 3/4 of a inch thick. Voltage is 7.2V, amperage 6.0Ah, making for 43.2 watt-hours.

Now we're getting to dismantling the Mesa 4. Below to the left you can see what it looks like once the four sturdy gray/orange corner bumpers of the tablet are off, after undoing two small Philips screws each. Underneath the bumpers are four anchored metal clips that serve as lanyard loops. They easily pop off. Now there is access to all 11 of the Philips screws that hold the housing of the Mesa together. Oh, and the modular bumper design would make it very easy to put on larger bumpers that provide even more protection.

There is just one wire connection between the two halves (that for the speaker), and the halves separate easily. There are also no clips or tabs that need to be pried apart (and can easily be damaged). As for the Mesa 4's housing material, it's not just generic ABS plastic. It's a PC-siloxane copolymer blend that excels at resistance to chemicals and excellent impact toughness.

Sealing between the two halves of the tablet is accomplished with a replaceable light-gray o-ring seal that sits in a complex groove around the entire perimeter of the device. Always carefully examine that seal before reassembly; improper seating may crimp or damage the seal, which can result in leaking.

In the picture series above, the righthand image shows the back half of the disassembled Mesa 4. It contains the 1-watt speaker with surface-mount contacts, but no other electronics. The speaker is sealed to the outside with a thick bead of white silicone glue. Also visible is the stylus garage.

The image above in the middle shows the interior of the front half of the Mesa 4. That's where all electronics are. Structurally it consists of the PC-siloxane copolymer front half upon which is mounted on an intricate magnesium frame custom designed for the Mesa 4. That frame is secured with over a dozen small Torx T5 screws.

Now let's take a closer look at the circuits and components. Prominent is the Mesa 4's (optional) internal 21.6 watt-hour Li-Ion battery. Combined with the replaceable externally accessible 43.2 watt-hour battery, this means a total of 64.8 watt-hours of battery power. That's a lot for a small tablet. More, in fact, than many larger tablets and even laptops have.

A lot of the connectivity inside the Mesa 4 is done via Amphenol interconnect components. Amphenol is one of the largest manufacturers of interconnect products in the world with sales of about US$12.5 billion. Componentized connectivity with such modules looks neat and clean, eliminates all those loose wires often found inside devices, and undoubtedly contributes to reliability and ruggedness.

As far as I/O goes, external ports are often a weak point in the sealing of a device, because the sealing entirely relies on whatever port protection there is via covers or rubber plugs. Juniper knows that and came up with a different solution: the ports are actually outside of the inner, sealed part of the Mesa 4. That means that only the flat ribbon cable connection of the ports to the interior of the device must be sealed, which is easier and far less prone to leakage. Separating I/O from the motherboard also means that Juniper can easily change the I/O block (updates, replacement of damaged ports, customized options).

So here goes. The new chip in the Mesa 4 is simply called the "Intel Processor N200" and it's part of Intel's line of "Alder Lake-N" CPUs, or in Intel speak "Products formerly Alder Lake-N." Now there is actually a very nice and picturesque Alder Lake some 25 miles south of Tacoma, but that likely means nothing; Intel has been code-naming a good number of chip generations after lakes. To techies, on the other hand, Alder Lake is a big deal.

That's because code name Alder Lake was/is Intel's first major chip line that uses the same kind of "hybrid" chip architecture that's been used in smartphones for many years. "Hybrid," because the chips include two kinds of processing cores. There are "performance cores" for the heavy lifting, and "efficiency cores" for all the lower level routine processing. The goal and concept was having chips that get good gas mileage AND good peak performance.

That's a good idea, and it's been fully implemented in Intel's "Alder Lake" 12th generation of Core processors, as well as the "Raptor Lake" 13th and 14th generations. Most of these processors have a small number of performance cores and a large number of efficiency cores. I say "most," because the Intel Alder Lake-N chips have ONLY efficiency cores and no performance cores. So nothing hybrid there.

How can that be? "Alder Lake" STANDS for hybrid. Well, Alder Lake-N isn't hybrid. It's befuddling, but it's really all part of Intel's overall rebranding of their processors. For many years, most Intel CPUs were either using expensive high-end, high-performance "Core" processing cores, or they were using inexpensive, low-end, low-performance "Atom" cores. A Core chip could cost 20 times as much as an Atom chip. But who, really, wants a chip that's part of a "low-performance" line? Not many.

So for a while Intel befuddled things by also offering "Celeron" and "Pentium" branded chips that sometimes were using Atom and sometimes Core processors. That was not a good idea. So now everything's being renamed to make that vexing high/low end processor thing go away. No more "Atom" naming even though the Atom processor architecture is still here and still used. But "Core processor N-Series" sounds better. Oh, with that we're also getting back to the old "Intel Inside" sticker. And there you have it (and you can check it all out here)

Oh-oh. Is not having performance cores bad? Not at all. Because Intel processors have made huge progress on any level. The "Gracemont" microarchitecture, while technically "Atom" is now as, or more, powerful than the Core architecture of just a few years ago.

So that all said, how fast is the new Mesa 4 with its non-hybrid hybrid processor? The Intel Processor N200 is no slouch. It's a genuine quad-core chip with a maximum turbo frequency of 3.70GHz. It has 6MB of Intel Smart Cache. It has Intel UHD Graphics. And it uses way less power than any of the genuine Core processors and thus generates less heat. And that's why the Mesa can do without a noisy and potentially troublesome mechanical fan.

The table below shows some of the small — i.e. 7-inch or 8-inch screens — rugged tablets we have tested. Some are recent, like the Durabook R8 or the RuggON Luna, others are older and haven't been updated to newer tech, mostly because for their manufacturers they represent niche rather than mainstream products.

Brightness is important, but it's not everything. A screen backlight can be so bright that it washes out the display and quickly drains the battery.

What matters at least as much as brightness is how well the display works outdoors and in sunlight. That requires reducing the reflectivity of the display via polarizers and coatings, and reducing the number of reflective surfaces within the layers of your typical LCD assembly as much as possible. That's done via direct bonding of layers.

Actual brightness, of course, matters too. Juniper lists the display as "outdoor viewable" and lists an 800 nits rating, which is a measure of how powerful a backlight is. That's where luminance, the intensity of light emitted, comes in. Luminance is measured in candela per square meter, where candela refers to luminous intensity, the power emitted by a light source. We have our own luminance testing equipment, and the Mesa 4 clocked in at an impressive 1024 nits of maximum luminance. That is much more than the 680 nits we measured on the Mesa 3 a few years ago.

To show what the Mesa 4 display looks like outdoors, we shot a series of uncorrected pictures. The images below show the Mesa 4 outdoors on a sunny Tennessee May early afternoon in a partially shaded area. The display is bright and very viewable. The screen has a very wide viewing angle; looking at it from any angle does not affect screen brightness, nor are there any variations in color or contrast. We consider that very important. Also, we noted that the Mesa 4 does not have the slight yellow/blue tinge we observed on some earlier Mesa displays when viewed from different angles.

That, however, doesn't mean everything must be all finger touch and only finger touch all the time. Especially out there in the field, having physical buttons in addition to finger touch and stylus often comes in handy. The Mesa 4 function buttons beneath its display are programmable and really add to functionality.

While each of the key has a symbol printed on it, all except the power button of these physical keys can be programmed in a special Keypad Buttons and Backlight panel. Selecting the desired function or assignment is via a drop-down menu.

As far as the capacitive touch interface goes, when we did a detailed review of the original Mesa (which used resistive touch and a passive stylus), we discussed emerging touch technologies with Juniper. At that time, Juniper felt that capacitive touch would continue to improve and that they would experiment with the technology until it became suitable for rugged work environments.

Capacitive touch did improve in leaps and bounds, and the Mesa 4, of course, has the kind of smooth, responsive capacitive multi-touch users have come to expect.

When we reviewed the Mesa 3 Windows a few years ago, it came with two pens (shown on the right). One had a hard, narrow tip (about 3mm) and allowed fairly precise operations, like selecting the small objects that often continue to be part even of Windows 11. The other was a much wider soft-tipped stylus, the kind that looks like a rounded pencil eraser and is often used to tap on iPads and Android tablets. That kind of stylus coud still come in handy when using mostly touch-optimized apps on the Mesa 4.

As is, the Mesa 4 has a number of different touchscreen settings:

• Stylus or finger: Finger and both pens are recognized.

• Finger: For use with fingers or to some extent a soft-tipped stylus. This likely works by ignoring anything but the large touch area of a finger or soft stylus with a wide tip.

• Fine Hard-Tip Stylus: For use with the narrow tip stylus. This mode is good for drawing or writing, or whenever you don't want your fingers to inadvertently trigger an action. Juniper probably made that work by ignoring touch signals above a certain size. Interestingly, a regular pencil or some narrow-tip metal styli also work, but not a narrow plastic stylus.

• Glove: This mode makes the touch display work with some (but not all) gloves. Thickness and texture matter. This mode probably increases the sensitivity of the touch controller. It doesn't work with the narrow-tip pen.

• Wet/Finger: That's the profile to use when it's raining or the tablet is used where it's subjected to water splashing, or when it's snowing. This mode doesn't work with gloves on.

• Wet/Stylus: This mode is optimized for use with the narrow-tip stylus when it's raining or snowing or there's water splashing. This mode does work with gloves.

  We don't know how exactly Juniper implemented these various modes — it can get pretty complex to get capacitive touch to do all that —, but their rain profile works indeed very well. Well enough to make working in the rain possible.

The big picture is this: when Apple introduced capacitive multi-touch, it introduced it together with software and a user interface designed from scratch for capacitive multi-touch. Unlike Android, which was designed from scratch for capacitive multi-touch, Windows isn't a natural for touch. But between a lot of touch functionality added in Windows 11 and Juniper's utilities and settings, touch works far better with Windows than it has just a few years ago.

The situation changed drastically with the advent of smartphones whose amazingly competent and versatile cameras have pretty much wiped out the traditional point-and-shoot cameras. Unfortunately, cameras built into rugged handhelds and tablets continued to lag behind in quality compared to those in consumer smartphones, but the situation has improved in recent years.

What does the Mesa 4 offer in terms of imaging? That would be a 5-megapixel user-facing camera for video calls and such, and a rear-mounted 13-megapixel camera with LED flash for documentation tasks. That's a big step up from the 2mp/8mp cameras in the Windows version of the Mesa 3.

The standard Windows Camera app (version 2024.2402.5.0) on our review Mesa 4 was simple, but got the job done. Default screen controls are limited to Time delay (off, 2 sec, 5 sec, 10 sec), HDR (on, off, or pro), Flash (on, off, auto), and a digital zoom slider. Settings, likewise are limited. You can select from three resolutions from 8.3mp to 12.6mp in 4:3 and 16:9 aspect ratio images; image quality is fixed; and you can superimpose four different framing grids. There is a "Pro" mode that adds manual focus, ISO, shutter speed and exposure compensation, and white balance settings. In addition to photo and video, there are panorama, document, whiteboard and barcode modes.

Below are some sample pictures we shot with the standard Camera app in its high quality mode, which resulted in 4096 x 3072 pixel (12mp) pictures. Click on the image compilation for a full size version.

The Mesa 4 camera can shoot video in six resolutions: 360p, 480p, 720p, 1080p, 1440p and 2160p.

For data acquisition, Juniper offers the Mesa 4 with an integrated imager/decoder and a Barcode Connector utility for scanner configuration, settings and testing. The barcode reader has a range from an inch to about two feet, depending on code and conditions.

• For ingress protection, the tablet rates a superior IP68. The first number stands for protection against solids. 6 is as high as it gets, and it means the unit is totally protected against the finest dust.

  To reiterate, the second number is for the degree of protection from liquids. That scale goes from 0 (no protection) to 8. The Mesa 3's "8" liquid protection rating means the device is protected against long periods of immersion. It's up to the manufacturer to report how deep and how long. In general, Juniper tests its IP68-rated gear for two hours at about five feet.

• The Mesa has a wide operating temperature range of -4 to 122 degrees Fahrenheit.

  While not quite as extreme as that of the Archer 3 ultra-rugged handheld (which can go as low as -22 degrees Fahrenheit and as high as 140 degrees), this makes the Mesa 4 suitable for deployment in just about any environmental setting, even freezers.

• As far as the ever-popular drop testing goes, the Mesa 4 survives multiple drops from four feet onto concrete. That's also a bit less than the super-rugged Archer 3, but remarkable considering that the Mesa 4 is a larger, heavier platform with a much larger display.

Juniper indicates that additional testing was performed according to MIL-STD-810H procedures: Method 500.5 Low Pressure (Altitude); Method 503.5 Temperature Shock; Method 506.5 Rain; Method 507.5 Humidity; Method 510.5 Sand and Dust; Method 512.5 Immersion; Method 514.6 Vibration.

There are few caveats we have regarding Mesa 4 ruggedness. Whereas with the original Mesa, we cautioned that its many seals all had to be in perfect condition for optimal protection, the Mesa 4 has just two seals to watch, the main one between the two halves of the device, and the battery compartment cover seal. So the Mesa 4 seems very well protected indeed.

Note that while the great majority of mobile devices use Corning's Gorilla Glass which is used in literally billions of units, Juniper chose the competing Asahi Dragontrail glass. We have not seen conclusive information that one is better than the other.

Users seeking to upgrade from the Mesa 3 will appreciate the substantial performance increase the Mesa 4 provides with its quad-core Intel N200 processor, as well as the doubling of RAM, much faster (PCIe) mass storage, faster Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, and a much brighter screen.