Dell to enter rugged laptop market

The market for rugged laptops--the sort of "indestructible" PCs used by law enforcement, military and construction workers--today sees the entrance of a major enterprise hardware player. Dell, one of the world's top sellers of PC hardware, dips its large toes in the rugged PC waters today, with the announcement of the Latitude ATG (all-terrain grade) D620--which the company is marketing as a "semi-rugged" notebook PC. Built to live up to U.S. military standards for shock, vibration, humidity and altitude, the laptop sports a starting price tag of $2499. "It will resist vibrations if it's mounted to an emergency vehicle, for example. For construction workers, it has dust protection. These are very key problems in these types of environments, and we wanted a notebook that met those needs, and we believe we have created a very robust solution," said Greg Dvorak, product marking manager for Dell's Latitude series. For companies who deploy Dell machines to regular users and Panasonic ToughBooks to workers in the field, a rugged Latitude might help simplify the buying process.

For more on the semi-rugged Latitude:
- see this eWeek article