The difference between a plain vanilla consumer design and rugged machinery is already evident in the pictures below. While most of today's consumer tablets can't even be opened anymore, the xTablet T1175 has two externally accessible openings that allow customization with various modules and components. The battery, too, can easily be replaced. And there's a snap-mount anchor for quick insertion and removal into mounting systems.

In terms of construction, the xTablet T1175 consists of a stiff what seems to be polycarbonate plastic housing, albeit one without an internal magnesium chassis like the predecessor T1185 had. The LCD mounts onto the front part of the housing, and the motherboard, components and modules on top of that . The front part of the housing is implemented as a shallow open box. The flat rear part is covered in many areas for reinforcement.

Should the need arise to open up the tablet, remove the four bumper assemblies, undo some dozen and a half small Philips screws and separate the halves. There are no cables or ribbons between the two halves, which service personnel will much appreciate. Below you can see what the xTablet T1175 looks like inside:

Sealing between the two parts of the housing is of a tongue-and-groove design, with a thin hard plastic lip on the back part of the housing pressing against a replaceable blue o-ring seal sitting inside a groove around the perimeter of the front part of the housing.

The square-shaped 66 watt-hour rechargeable Li-Ion battery of the T1175 snaps into its compartment and fits almost flush like the smaller 40 watt-hour packs that were standard on prior versions of the platform. The battery has its own o-ring seal, which is necessary as the battery compartment includes not only the battery terminal openings into the interior of the tablet, but also openings for the unit's microSD and micro SIM slots. The seal sits a bit loose, so make sure it's there when you take the tablet in the field.

The battery, which is hot-swappable thanks to the small 0.59 watt-hour backup battery, is secured in place with a lever that has a spring-loaded lock. It is unlikely to come loose during operation.

Unlike the interior of many Windows tablets, which are jam-packed full of electronics, the T1175 looks relatively tidy inside. The motherboard is much larger than inside earlier Intel Atom-based version of the tablet. Some of the circuits sit underneath metal EMI shielding.

There's a half-size mini PCIe slot for a mobile broadband module. Antennae and their wiring is already pre-installed. WiFi and Bluetooth are handled via an Intel AX210 802.11 a/b/g/n/ac/ax Wi-Fi 6E module with Bluetooth v5.3. Almost all I/O is edge-mounted on the motherboard, exceptions being the surface-mount docking connector and the second USB-C port for charging. This is a very highly integrated and very professionally executed design.

The interior layout is almost completely devoid of miniaturized ribbon cables that usually connect this and that. What you do see is the black heat pipe that goes from the covered processor area into the fan compartment with its fan and heat exchanger. Note that, despite its grills to the side and back of the unit, the fan compartment is completely sealed to the interior of the tablet. Should water get into the fan compartment, the fan can handle that.

To the right is a look at all the bolt-on options available for the T1175. The 3D camera can enable multi-mode mobile dimensioning in the warehouse, saving plenty of time. The magstripe reader and 3-in-1 payment options make the T1175 a powerful mobile point-of-sale station.

As for as protection goes, each of the tablet's peripheral port openings has its own separate protective door with a friction seal. These individual port covers are actually all cut from one single piece of rubbery material, which can easily be replaced. For drop/bump protection, the housing has rubbery shock-absorbing foundations for the screw-on corner bumpers of the tablet. If the extra protection afforded by the heavy duty corner bumpers is not needed, they can be taken off and the tablet can be used without them, making for a smaller footprint.

Shown below are some of interesting details of the xTablet T1175. On the left the self-contained fan compartment with its very light and very quiet fan. No water gets from there inside the electronics part of the tablet. In the center the micro-SIM card slot accessible from inside the battery compartment. And on the right a close look at the blue o-ring seal that keeps liquids out.

And more details below: On the left a look at the tablet's 8-megapixel rear camera and LED flash next to it. It's amazing how very tiny those have become. In the middle one of the screw-on protective corner bumpers, and on the right the small backup battery that allows just enough uninterrupted running time to pop in a replacement main battery.

Overall, the insides of the xTablet T1175 show a complete, powerful PC stuffed into a small space, but much of the componentry and electronics have been miniaturized more like those in a consumer tablet. Quality is very high, with good fit and finish.

And so the xTablet T1175 runs Windows 11 Professional (an optional downgrade to Windows 10 Pro is available) on a powerful Intel "Raptor Lake" 13th generation Core processor. That warrants some background.

For many years, Intel's high-end Core-brand CPUs consisted of multiple processing cores of the same kind. That meant that all work was handled by those powerful cores, even if all that power wasn't really needed for simple tasks.

So with the "Alder Lake" 12th generation of their Core processors, Intel introduced a "hybrid" processor architecture that combined large, powerful performance cores ("p-cores") and smaller, simpler economy cores ("e-cores") in one chip. Because it's not really efficient to use high-performance cores for simple routine or background work (smartphones have been using different, specialized cores for different work for years).

In "Alder Lake," p-cores handled the heavy lifting, and e-cores — basically using Intel Atom processor technology — handled all the simple routing work, with a "thread director" analyzing workload and sending tasks to the proper type of core. That's the tech used in MobileDemand's xTablet T1690.

But time never stands still in the rapidly advancing world of computer processor design. In the "Raptor Lake" 13th generation, Intel improved and enhanced that hybrid processor architecture by increasing the core count, expanding L2 cache memory, raising clock speed, supporting faster DDR5 memory, as well as various fine-tunings and enhancements. Raptor Lake is like Intel hybrid chips 2.0. And that's what's in the xTablet T1175, making it one of the earliest adopters of this new and promising technology.

So it's no surprise that the xTablet T1175, too, has a very good display. Measuring 10.1 inches diagonally it's better suited for serious Microsoft Windows-based work than smaller tablets. It offers 1920 x 1200 pixel resolution in 16:10 wide-format. That has pretty much become the standard for this type of tablet (though we're starting to see even higher resolution in some higher-end products now).

On a 10.1-inch tablet screen, 1920 x 1200 translates into 224 points per inch (ppi), which is in the range that Apple declared as "retina" — pixels so small that the eye can't distinguish individual pixels. That means even small text looks very sharp and crisp on the display. The xTablet T1175 uses 10-point projected capacitive multi-touch for effortless tapping, panning, pinching and zooming. Using Microsoft Windows on very small touch screens can be a challenge. It's less of an issue on a larger display like the T1185's, and Windows 11 is better suited to capacitive touch than its predecessors. Given the high-tech nature of the T1175, the passive stylus with its big 5mm metal-mesh tip that comes with the unit seems dated, but it does work fine.

In daily use, the display works very well. The spec sheet claims 800 nits luminance. We measured 688, which may be due to the T1175's fairly thick screen protector. To put that in perspective, most standard laptops offer around 250 nits, premium tablets are generally in the 500 nits range, and displays specially built to use in sunlight may have over 1,000 nits. Subjectively, the T1175 screen is nice and bright, and very vibrant indoors. Outdoors, of course, perceived brightness depends on how bright it is outdoors on any given day and working condition.

The three pictures below show what you can expect outdoors from the T1175. The pictures were taken on a bright sunny winter day. Head on, the display looks bright and offers very good contrast. The middle and right pictures show the impact of refection as you look at the screen from different angles. Like almost all modern tablets, the T1175 has a glossy display surface, so there will be reflections. The T1175 is bright enough to work well outdoors, but, just as with any modern handheld or tablet, one needs to avoid reflections. If that is an issue, MobileDemand offers an anti-glare screen protector.

We cannot overemphasize how important a wide viewing angle is for a satisfying, non-disruptive viewing experience. Older and lesser display technologies are prone to often dramatic color and contrast shifts when viewed from different angles, something that we don't consider acceptable anymore. The xTablet T1175's display is immune to such shifts, which makes it a pleasure to use.

Cameras integrated into handheld and tablet computers have historically underperformed compared to even low-end dedicated cameras and, more recently, the cameras available in virtually every smartphone. Things have gotten better on the built-in camera front, but usually not enough to eliminate the need of taking along a dedicated camera or smartphone if photo or video documentation is needed on the job. This remains a concern given that the cameras in leading smartphones are now capable of excellent picture and video quality.

When we reviewed a predecessors of the T1175, the original xTablet T1150 and then the T1185, we mentioned that due to the barebones Windows Camera app we couldn't really test all the likely settings and capabilities of the tablet's camera hardware. The Windows Camera app version in the T1175, likewise, is very basic. It does have a number of recording modes (barcode scanning, whiteboards, document, photo and video), and there is an "advanced controls" setting that at least allows for manual focus, brightness control, white balance settings, 2/5/10 second timer, and flash on/off, auto.

When using the cameras, the documentation camera offers seven different still image resolutions ranging from 0.4mp to the full 8.0mp, and users can shoot video in four resolutions ranging from 480p to 1080p, all at 30 frames per second. In still photography, auto-focus worked fine, images were reasonably crisp and sharp, and the camera does not over-compress images. Video was sharp enough for almost all purposes and did not lag behind. It pays to take time shooting pictures as there's a slight lag between pressing the shutter and the image being taken.

The front camera, offers seven still image resolutions ranging from 0.03mp to 1.9mp, and six video resolutions, from 120p to 720p. It worked well enough for conferencing.

Below are some sample pictures shot with the xTablet T1175 documentation camera in 3264 x 1836 pixel resolution.

Like we found in our testing of earlier MobileDemand rugged tablets, the T1175's integrated documentation camera is suitable for most documentation tasks, both in still shots and in video. It's nice to have the big 10-inch screen as a viewfinder. Pictures actually come out a lot sharper than they appear on the screen.

That said, the problem is that smartphone cameras have become so very good and so competent. As a result, users expect the same from rugged handhelds and tablets, especially since those cameras should help them with their work and jobs.

Mounting and docking options