What does the mobile point-of-sale (mPOS) approach require? That would be a device that can record and process a sale. This involves several steps and may involve both manual and automatic processes. In fully electronic mobile systems, item IDs are scanned, credit and debit card information is read via magnetic stripe or chip, and the interaction between the mPOS system wirelessly communicates back and forth with the card processing entity. The customer is authenticated via electronic means, a pin number, or both. If required, a signature can be captured via electronic ink. Once a transaction has cleared, a receipt may be emailed to the customer or printed on a mobile printer.

Most mPOS systems integrate some but not all of these assorted means of data collection into the actual mobile device that's being carried around. Why not have everything in one device?

Because having all conceivably required physical ports and all possible data capture and authentication technologies onboard would add too much size and weight to a mobile system. Hence ARBOR put part of the reading and authentication subsystems into the tablet, and part into the cradle.

But doesn't that approach defeat the very purpose of an mPOS system? It doesn't; the cradle is still small and light (3.6 pounds) to bring along almost anywhere.

And by not integrating all of the conceivably required mPOS components into the tablet, ARBOR broadened the appeal of the G0830 tablet beyond just mPOS applications. There are numerous warehousing, hospitality, and retail applications that need RFID/NFC, cameras, and scanners, but not necessarily the card readers and authentication modules.

The tablet is, for being part of a professional POS setup, surprisingly small and elegant. Its 8.21 x 5.93 inch footprint is just barely larger than that of an iPad mini (7.8 x 5.3 inches). Yet, despite its small size, it's immediately clear that this is a device for work, tough and durable enough to take some abuse. That's evident in the rubberized protection that goes around the entire unit. And also in the raised rubberized bumper strips to the left and right of the display. Why is that important? Because roughly half of all smartphone and tablet users have experienced a shattered display, and displays shatter when they fall flat onto their glass surface. Even small bumpers radically reduce that possibility.

Below is a look at the Gladius G0830 tablet from the front and from all four sides. This shows that while from the front the device looks just like a consumer media tablet, the side views reveal that this is a tool for the job.

Note that despite the tablet's obvious toughness and the presence of protected ports and an industrial grade barcode reader, the body of the Gladius G0830 is only half an inch thick, with the scanner "bulge" protruding another fraction of an inch. Also note the front glass providing enough of a margin beyond the LCD screen for unimpeded operation of the capacitive touch display.

Looking at the side views, there's the surface-mount spring-loaded pin dock connector at the bottom, the scanner window on top with the volume rocker and the power button next to it. The tablet's I/O is split into two blocks, both of which have tight-fitting protective rubber covers. The covers provide a good friction seal as long as they are pushed into place properly. Unlike some such covers, these are easy to open and they can't get lost because they are attached to the unit with a short rubber strip.

The image below shows the left side of the Gladius tablet with the protective doors open (and photoshopped out of the way). The lefthand I/O block includes a standard audio jack and a slot for a Micro SIM card. The righthand block has a micro USB 2.0 port with OTG support, and next to it a micro SD card slot.

At first sight it looks like the entire front face is glass, but the glass is actually inlaid into the aluminum front, and there is a quarter-inch bezel on the short sides of the rectangle that also has dark-gray rubber molding on it for protection.

There are no access doors on the back of the device, and there's also no battery compartment door. There are two metal braces that act as anchors for an elastic handstrap. And there's a bulge that houses the unit's Zebra SE4710 1D/2D scanner.The gray inlay in the scanner bulge is actually two scanner buttons.

Also note the unit's camera lens cover in the upper right. There does not appear to be an LED flash. On the other side of the device are two small grilles for the stereo speakers.

To open the tablet and get a peek inside (or get to the battery) is easy. Just undo ten small black Philips screws and the two halves can easily be separated. There are no pesky clips or snaps here. There is just a single wire assembly going between the two halves. It connects the scanner to the motherboard and can easily be disconnected.

The seal between the two halves is a tongue-and-groove design where a plastic lip on the back half presses into a groove around the aluminum front. There's no o-ring seal. We're not totally thrilled with this solution, but it's good enough for IP54 sealing. More evidence of the IP54 sealing are the two speaker grilles that keep water out with just a pressure seal around the two little speakers on the front side, and the screw holes that are inside the unit, without additional protective rubber washers. Again, that's all fine for IP54.

Now you can examine the inside of the Gladius G0830. The backside is really just a bare cover with nothing but the scanner mounted on it. All electronics and components are mounted onto the front half.

Prominently visible now is the large, but very thin, Lithium-Polymer battery. It's a 3.8 Volt, 4,000 mAh design that makes for 15.2 watt-hours. The battery sits loose in between two metal guides that are part of the overall aluminum front of the tablet. While not externally accessible, replacing the battery, which is plugged into the mother board, is therefore easy. The black rectangle on top of the battery is the NFC antenna.

The unit's motherboard measures roughly 5 x 3.25 inches. It is not as hyper-integrated as your typical smartphone or consumer tablet circuit boards, but it's considerably more miniaturized as even small PC-style boards. No daughterboards, PCIe slots or other separate components here; everything is soldered right onto the motherboard. All of the G0830's I/O, controls and card slots are edge-mounted on the motherboard, too.

There are no RAM slots or visible mass storage either. That's all integrated into the motherboard. That saves space, but also means that whatever comes with the device is what you get, in this case 2GB of DDR3L RAM and 64GB of eMMC mass storage. The latter can be complemented via the externally accessible microSD card slot.

It almost goes without saying that the unit's super-efficient Atom x5-Z8350 processor doesn't require a fan. In fact, it doesn't need heat pipes or any other thermal engineering either. Whatever heat it produces is soaked up by the unit's substantial aluminum front and also a 2x3 inch of copper foil (which we removed for the photography).

The 1.44GHz quad-core X5-Z8350 is part of Intel's next-gen 64-bit "Cherry Trail" system-on-chip platform that is based on contemporary 14nm process technology and comes with Broadwell-architecture Intel HD Graphics. The X5-Z8350 has a very low thermal design power of just 2 watts and can reach burst frequencies of up to 1.92GHz. Compared to the predecessor "Bay Trail" platform, comparable "Cherry Trail" chips aren't necessarily quicker, but their Broadwell-type graphics subsystems are said to be substantially faster.

What's also interesting is that "Cherry Trail" supports Windows as well as Android. As a result, ARBOR offers the G0830 either with Windows 10 or with Android 5.x.

To see how the quad-core X5-Z8350 fares in the Gladius G0830, we used Passmark Software's PerformanceTest 6.1 that runs about 30 tests covering CPU, 2D graphics, 3D graphics, memory, and disk and then computes scores for each category and an overall PassMark score. We also ran our secondary standard benchmark suit, CrystalMark. For comparison, we're listing our benchmark results for a variety of other industrial, enterprise and vertical market tablets RuggedPCReview has recently tested. The results are as follows:

ARBOR chose 10-point capacitive multi-touch for the Gladius G0830, which makes sense as most applications will primarily require quick finger tapping.

Dock and data collection