Why won't a regular tablet display do? Haven't they come a long way in the last few years? Yes, they have, but direct sunlight still washes them out and it usually requires hooding the display, looking for a shady spot, or finding just the right angle to see what's on the screen. Why do conventional LCD displays have such problems outdoors, and what solutions have been tried to fix that?

Overall, at this point, most standard LCDs are transmissive, which means that you have a backlight behind the LCD. This approach works great indoors because the ratio between the strength of the backlight and the reflected ambient light is very high. Outdoors, the ambient light is much stronger, and so the ratio between the strength of the backlight and the amount of reflected light is much smaller, which means there is much less contrast and the screen washes out and becomes unreadable.

Different approaches to make displays readable outdoors have been tried in the past. One approach was to make screens reflective instead of transmissive. This way, the brighter the sunlight, the more readable the display became. This never caught on for two reasons. First, since you couldn't use a backlight, you needed a sidelight to make the screen viewable indoors. That just doesn't work with displays larger than those in a small handheld. Second, even outdoors, the screens looked flat because the LCD background was greenish-brown, and not white.

Another approach was "transflective" screens. Transflective screens were part transmissive and part reflective by using sort of a half-silvered mirror behind the LCD layer. This was supposed to be the best of both worlds, but in reality while some light was reflected it cut the transmitted light, making the displays very dim in indoor lighting conditions. It was really just a compromise that didn't work very well. So that has mostly been abandoned.

What they came up with was a better, different transflective display. The core of it is a technology where pixels consist of a transmissive and a reflective part that have separate drivers. In essence, that allows them to have a "triple mode" display that can use one or both technologies, depending on the lighting situation. What are the three modes?

• There's a transmissive mode with (in the ConkerTab NX10 screen) standard 1024 x 600 pixel WSVGA resolution and 256k colors.

  That translates into 118 ppi (pixel per inch); not very much, but still more than, say, all pre-retina Apple iMacs and most pre-retina Apple MacBooks.

• There's a transflective mode that still uses 1024 x 600 resolution but combines that with 64 grayscales. The backlight is still on, but the reflective subpixels now reflect ambient light, so the colors are desaturated.

  What that means is that if a ConkerTab NX10 user takes the tablet and walks from an office indoor first to a brighter atrium or entry and then into the bright, sunlight outdoors, the display will go from full color to increasingly muted color, and then to almost full grayscale.

• Then there's a reflective mode where the resolution can triple to 3072 x 600 pixel, i.e it's three times as high horizontally (and a super-sharp 310 ppi). Why the tripling in reflective mode? Probably because the R, G, and B parts that make up one pixel in color mode are then used in black and white mode, and thus become separate pixels that can be separately controlled. Each pixel has 6-bit adjustment, which means 64 gray scales. When used as color pixels, 64 x 64 x 64 equals 262,144 shades of color, or 256k.

  The very obvious caveat is that this is only acceptable if color isn't an issue. If it is — and lots of software uses color codings or relies on color in any other way — all bets are off and the Pixel Qi display may not be a viable option. However, if color doesn't matter, or if there's software specifically developed for use outdoors and with a Pixel Qi display device, then this special display becomes a terrific solution.

Now let's see how the NX10's Pixel Qi display compares to a high-end tablet with an excellent conventional display, the Apple iPad Air 2.

The first comparison picture to the right shows the iPad Air 2 and the Pixel Qi-equipped ConkerTab NX10 side by side in a dimly lit office. Both tablets are set to adjust backlighting automatically depending on ambient light.

The Pixel Qi display is plenty bright without, however, having the richness and deep color saturation of the iPad. Also, the underlying LCD is not of the IPS variety, which means there are contrast and color shifts when changing the viewing angle both horizontally and vertically.

The second picture compares the two tablets in a much more brightly lit office. You can see how the color on the Pixel Qi display, while retaining a decent picture, is starting to fade. That's because the display is seamlessly graduating into transflective mode, combining its 1024 x 600 color pixel resolution with 64 grayscales.

The third picture has the two tablets placed on a lawn outside, but not directly facing the sun.

In the absence of reflections, the iPad shines here, demonstrating how far conventional transmissive displays have come. The Pixel Qi display remains perfectly readable, but color has faded further as the display is moving more and more to reflective mode.

The fourth comparison very clearly demonstrates the ugly reality of glossy conventional transmissive displays when facing reflections. They pretty much turn into mirrors and become largely unreadable.

Users of devices with conventional displays must now hunt for shade or find an angle that lets them see what's on the screen. Not pleasant.

The NX10 with its Pixel Qi display and semi-matte display surface is unaffected. Color is largely gone now, but the tablet remains completely viewable.

In the fifth picture, the nightmare scenario for a conventional display: direct sunlight. The sun completely overpowers the transmissive iPad screen and it is now longer readable.

The NX10 display is now fully in reflective mode and remains completely readable. The picture actually doesn't even do it justice as the display was brighter and clearer to the human eye. And the brighter the sunshine gets, the clearer the ConkerTab screen becomes.

The housing of the Conker NX10 consists of two PC+ABS polycarbonate halves. The halves are held together by a couple of dozen small Philips head screws. Sealing between the halves is via a complex replaceable three-dimensional black rubber gasket. Care must be taken not to hurt the gasket when opening the Conker tablet, and even greater care to make certain that the gasket, and especially the very thin parts around the I/O areas, is sitting exactly right.

Inside, things are fairly simple and easy to work on. There's no hefty metal chassis in here; instead, the Conker employs a thin steel plate where the display is mounted on one side and the electronics on the other.

The motherboard is an interesting design insofar as it consists of two boards that are connected to each other, embedded systems-style, via an edge connector. One side contains the processor, I/O ports, power jack, and RAM and mini-PCIe slot for the solid state disk (in our test unit a 128GB SanDisk Z400s mSATA module). The other side contains a mini-PCIe slot populated with a Sierra Wireless AirPrime MC7304 4G wireless module, a QCOM Technology 802.11b/g/n WiFi module, a QBTM400 Bluetooth v2.1 + EDR module, a SIM card slot, and wires going to the unit's various antennae. A variety of unused connectors suggests expansion potential.

The Celeron N2930 is part of Intel's "Bay Trail" platform which employs 22nm process technology and represents the first major advance in Atom microprocessor architecture since the platform arrived a few years ago. "Bay Trail," however, is not just another gen of Atom processors; instead, it's a large family of single, dual, and quad core processor chips optimized for various types of devices. And not all Bay Trail processors use Intel's "Atom" brand; higher end versions targeting notebooks, desktops and tablets carry Intel's "Celeron," such as the N2930 used in the NX10, and even "Pentium" brand names.

Further, unlike in earlier Atom chips, in "Bay Trail" CPUs Intel's Atom microprocessor architecture is paired with Intel's own graphics. They are of the same HD 4000 architecture as those used in Intel's 3rd generation "Ivy Bridge" processors, albeit with fewer execution units and lower clock speeds. They support most of the same APIs and features, there's also turbo boost in some processors (here called "burst speed"), and the clever power-saving "active idle" feature from Haswell core processors is there as well.

Intel's Atom processors initially played a rather unenviable role in the overall Intel processor lineup. Designed to draw very little power, they didn't cost much but also didn't offer anywhere near Core processor performance, and many early Atom-based products offered barely acceptable performance. This is likely one of the reasons why Intel is now using the Celeron and Pentium brand names for higher-end Bay Trail processors. Celeron chips, of course, have historically also been known as entry-level bare-bones chips, which has led many manufacturers of Bay Trail-based products to omit the brand names entirely.

To see how the quad-core N2930 fares in the ConkerTab NX10, 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 rugged tablets RuggedPCReview has recently tested. The results are as follows:

Deciding how rugged to make an industrial-grade tablet isn't easy. Building ruggedness into a product means extra size, weight, and cost. Hundreds of millions are using tablets now, and the platform has become fully accepted in numerous vertical markets. Many of those new potential customers want tablets, but may be tempted to go with attractive, inexpensive consumer market devices and spring for an extra case. If they break, they are cheap enough to be replaced. Problem is, most consumer market tablets are too fragile for field or even enterprise use.

Tablet Technologies seems to have a good grip on these issues, as the ConkerTab NX10 doesn't even attempt to seduce customers with a sleek consumer tablet look and design. The NX10 is rugged and basic, just black polymer plastic and then those big screw-on corner bumpers for extra protection.

As for hard ruggedness data, Tablet Technologies claims an operating temperature range of 14 to 122 degrees Fahrenheit, which allows operating of the tablet all the way from quite to brutally hot in the field. The NX10's IP65 ingress protection rating means it's totally dust-proof and is also protected from low pressure water jets from all directions. That means it won't like being dropped into a puddle or stream, but it can certainly survive rain and even a downpour. By "compliant with MIL-STD-810G" we assume Tablet Technologies meant the 4-foot drop, which is the height a tablet is normally held with the user standing or walking around.

In actual use, the NX10 certainly feels tough. It won't easily get scratched. The bumpers will guard against most impact damage, though they are too hard to provide the additional damage resistance via energy dissipation that rubber bumpers would. Unlike consumer market tablets where glass covers the entire front, the NX10's screen is recessed by a couple of millimeters into the front bezel. That would be an issue with a capacitive touchscreen because fingers would bop into the raised bezel when near the perimeter, but the NX10 uses resistive touch and thus will usually be operated with the supplied stylus. We already mentioned that a careful eye should be kept on the status of all sealing gaskets. About the only thing that we'd like to see changed is the battery locking system that seems too flimsy.

One additional suggestion, and one that we have to make surprisingly often, is for Tablet Technologies to supply more comprehensive ruggedness data in its specs and brochure. Rugged tablets cost extra because they are built stronger, so test result data ought to be supplied.

Summary: Tablet Technologies ConkerTab NX10