The challenge the Mesa Pro project team set for itself was creating a full-size tablet design based on high-performance Intel Core processor technology that could take on the established competition from Tier One companies that have been building such tablets for decades.

That competition includes heavyweights such as Dell, one of the world's largest PC makers, Panasonic, Getac, DT Research, Durabook, as well as a good number of others. Juniper certainly had plenty of experience creating tough and nearly indestructible smaller devices, but those didn't need active cooling, didn't have to provide the full desktop/laptop computing experience, and generally weren't in performance competition with the big guys.

That said, let's take a closer look at the Mesa Pro's design and construction. Below is the tablet's backside (left), and the backside with the protective corner bumpers and the battery compartment cover removed (right). Having easily replaceable screw-on bumpers has several advantages. Two are that Juniper offers bumpers in custom colors (a promo image shows nine different colors), and also that it'd be easy to create larger bumpers for even more protection, or forego bumpers altogether and just offer cover blanks.

At RuggedPCReview we generally open up review units to see if they are truly "rugged from the ground up," as they should be. It's what customers expect, and what they are paying a higher price for compared to a consumer tablet in a case.

Back in RuggedPCReview's early days we once marveled how quick and easy one could take the original Juniper Archer Field PC apart. The high-visibility orange plastic/rubber elastomer overmold came off easily to reveal the all-metal core of that ultra-rugged handheld. It's a little different with the modern era Mesa Pro. The elastomer protective bumpers come off easy, you just remove a couple of small screws each.

The housing of the tablet, though, consists of a solid, heavy nearly all-metal front with the display and all the electronics, and a polycarbonate, heavily contoured back cover with a cutout for the two batteries, an indented garage for the stylus, camera and scanner windows, and a number of cooling louvers and vents. The battery compartment cover is solid aluminum. There aren't any removable covers for easy access to RAM, storage or expansion slots, like you generally find on laptops and some tablets.

Separating the halves isn't inherently difficult, but does require a 1.3mm hex bit screw driver for the two dozen or so of tiny screw of different lengths that hold the halves together, some deeply recessed into the back cover. Clearly, Juniper doesn't expect you to take this tablet apart very often. And all those screws are needed to make certain that this IP68-rated ultra-rugged tablet does indeed never leak. Which is far from easy in a device of this complexity. Below are the two halves of the Mesa Pro.

If you look at the halves above, it would appear as if both the front and the back are rectangles with rounded corners, but that is not actually the case. Why not? Because the Mesa Pro's chassis is made of thick, solid aluminum, and wireless antennae must be placed outside of that metal chassis. Likewise, the Mesa Pro has a number of wired ports whose protective covers have to be open to use the ports in the field. Liquid can potentially get in through those port openings, which is why all of the Mesa Pro's ports are also placed outside of the completely sealed inner perimeter of the tablet. The same also applies to the tablet's small cooling fan that draws in ambient air through two louvres and expels hot air through the round vents on top of the fan. All of those areas can handle liquids. The actual electronics of the Mesa Pro, however, are in the totally sealed part of the tablet.

The seal between the back and the front part of the housing is a hard plastic lip on the backside that presses onto a thin white (in designs like that, we like to see the seal in a contrasting color; that makes it much easier to examine it for damage) rubber seal sitting in a channel on the front side (highlighted in green in the image above). The o-ring seal is long and complex but seems replaceable. The integrity of this seal is crucial, especially in areas where there is no groove and the seal gaps across flat ribbon cables.

And something else worth mentioning here. Everyone loves the small, reversible USB-C connection that is becoming a universal standard on new devices, and for good reason. USB-C plugs save space, are very versatile and you never have to worry about which side is up, as is the case with the original USB connectors.

However, those small USB-C connectors are also somewhat fragile and prone to come loose, especially when subjected to heavy vibration, which is common on forklifts or other vehicles. To address that issue, Juniper added threaded pegs to their special USB-C cable, so it can be very securely screwed into the strong metal body of the Mesa Pro. As Juniper relates, at some point "Darren had the cable connected with the threaded pegs and was swinging it around overhead like a helicopter and it remained connected."

The battery compartment is technically open to the inside of the computer though the battery terminals. To seal this area, there is a black rubber seal along the perimeter of the battery compartment. The aluminum battery compartment cover presses onto that seal.

The internal layout of the Juniper Mesa Pro is comparatively simple. The roughly 6 x 3 inch motherboard with almost all electronics sits underneath perhaps the thickest, strongest, most custom-designed metal cover we've ever seen in a mobile computer. It's securely held in place by a dozen screws. We're not talking quick and simple RAM and storage changes or upgrades here; you order this machine the way it's going to be.

The Intel Core processor of the Mesa Pro is a 12/28 watt design, which means that the tablet generates, and must dissipate, significantly more heat than any prior Juniper Systems device.

The heavy metal chassis certainly helps as it works as a heat sink, but to ascertain reliable performance even under peak load and high ambient temperatures, Juniper chose active thermal management as well. That includes a small fan and heat exchanger that, of course, is sealed towards the interior of the device. Dual copper pipes conduct heat away from the processor, ancillary electronics, and also the PCIe-based solid state disk.

The little fan in its black box is tiny, just 1.5 x 1.5 inches. It is not intrusive and certainly gets the job done. And it's smart, too: when it senses that the fan intake and exhaust are in any way obstructed, the Mesa will let you know with a notice on screen.

The pictures above illustrate the effectiveness of the Juniper Mesa Pro's thermal engineering, taken with our FLIR One Pro infrared camera during a strenuous PCMark 10 performance test benchmark run.

The bright yellow areas are the hottest, and that is where the heat is conducted away from electronics via the system's thermal pipes. On the left you can see the Mesa Pro's backside with the hottest spot, one of the fan exhaust louvres, reaching about 115F while the tablet is running the PCMark 10 benchmark. On the right, a look at the right backside of the tablet where all the ports are. From this angle we're seeing a max of 109F, very acceptable.

Bottomline of this inside checkup of the Juniper Systems Mesa Pro ultra-rugged tablet is that it is an extremely well-built machine that clearly shows Juniper's decades of experience in rugged mobile computing technology. The tablet's aluminum chassis is among the strongest we've seen, providing excellent strength and rigidity, while neatly separating the sealed interior from areas that need to be outside the metal chassis (such as antennae, the fan, and ports).

Computer displays have come a very long way since the dawn of tablets and laptops. They are now near perfect, especially in office environments with predictable ambient lighting. Outdoors is a different story, though, because outdoors is a) way brighter outdoors than indoors, and even the brightest display isn't a match for sunlight, and b) because outdoors there are always reflections that can quickly make a display unreadable.

Juniper has several decades' worth of experience in perfecting outdoor-usable displays in different sizes and for different applications. The company points out that while luminance — measured in candela per square meter, or just NITs — is generally used to compare outdoor displays, that's actually not all that matters. E-ink, for example, has no measurable luminance, but is highly visible outdoors.

Likewise, even very high luminance cannot make up for poor, or poorly chosen, display technology. It is the proper application of filters, polarizers and bonding processes that, combined with suitable luminance, makes for a good outdoor-usable display.

As is, good outdoor-viewable displays are now available from all of the major rugged systems vendors. Some are offering very high screen brightness of up to 1,500 nits, and optical treatments are continually refined. Standard laptop backlights are in the 250 nits luminance range, with some reaching into the 300-400 nits range. Industrial monitors used outdoors generally have 400 to 500 nits. High end rugged tablets offer anywhere from 500 to well over 1,000 nits.

In our earlier testing of Juniper products, we measured 530 nits in the company's Cedar CT8X2 tablet, 680 nits in the Windows version of the Juniper Mesa 3, 730 nits in the Android version of the Mesa 3, and just over 1,000 nits in the recently introduced Juniper Mesa 4. The Mesa Pro, by comparison, scored 841 nits in our testing.

The picture series below shows the Mesa Pro outdoors, where ambient light, reflections, the position of the sun and other factors constantly change. We found the Mesa Pro to be bright enough to be easily viewable under most conditions, with reflections being an unavoidable challenge. That's the case with all "glossy" displays in use today, from smartphones to tablets to laptops.

Glossy display "pop" nicely for a very vibrant viewing experience, and we've largely gotten used to living with their reflections. What often matters more is the horizontal and vertical viewing angles of a display. Narrow viewing angles can change color, contrast or sharpness depending on the angle the display is looked at. The Mesa Pro display has no such problems at all.