G0975 Review
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Technical White Paper The Anatomy of G0975 Rugged Tablet PC and How it Empowers the Field Service

Polished Bay Trail-powered rugged 9.7-inch tablet for mobile point-of-sale or warehousing ARBOR Technology, a Taiwan-based ISO-9001 certified embedded and networking manufacturer founded in 1993, announced the Gladius G0975 in Summer 2014 as an economically priced rugged Windows tablet for use in field service, transportation, logistics, mobile point-of-sale, and numerous other mobile and vehicular situations that require Microsoft enterprise compatibility in a contemporary device with multiple connectivity options. In this article, We take a detailed look at the ARBOR G0975. Right upfront,...

XGA display resolution most vertical market software is optimized for, as well as the ruggedness required to survive daily use out there in the field and on the job. Modern influences are seen in the tablet's elegant design, use of capacitive multi-touch, sleek profile, light weight, and affordable price. Taking a look at the Gladius G0975 The first impression you get when you unpack the Gladius is how elegant and professional it looks. While it's clearly a ruggedized tablet for commercial use, the very professional fit and finish and...

Note that the tablet's I/O is split into two blocks, both of which have tight-fitting protective covers. The covers are flexible plastic with a friction seal molded onto them. The covers have soft plastic hinges and provide a very good seal if they are pushed into place properly. Prying them open can be a bit of a challenge, and users may have to resort to the fingernail grooves on top of the covers. The Gladius has an elegantly designed rubbery protective rim molded onto the top part of its housing. The rim rises up to 1/16th of an inch...

Note that the battery cover is very securely held in place with 11 screws, so this is not a device where users can quickly pop in a freshly charged replacement battery. A rubber pressure seal between the cover and the housing holds dust and liquids out. The battery itself is a pack that looks like four camera batteries in series, wrapped in black plastic, and with a short cable that plugs into the motherboard. There is no additional seal around the battery connector; it's not really needed as water won't make it past the cover seal. To open...

The Gladius' battery situation is somewhat unusual insofar as ARBOR offers a standard externally accessible battery, but also a secondary internal battery with half the capacity. Installing the internal battery requires taking the unit apart, so this is something that should be ordered at the time of the initial purchase. We highly recommend purchasing the internal battery, not so much for hotswapping purposes (unscrewing the battery cover in the field isn't really an option), but to boost total battery capacity into where we'd like it to...

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. ARBOR isn't one of them, though, and proudly points to the "high computing performance" of the Celeron chip inside the Gladius. To see how the quad-core N2930 fares in the Gladius G0975, 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....

Overall CrystalMark The results are interesting. For one thing they show that Intel "Bay Trail" truly represents a significant step forward compared to the prior Intel "Cedarview" chips (which themselves were a big step ahead of earlier Atom processors). And the results also show that here quad-core configuration really makes a difference compared to dual-core designs (which isn't always the case). Overall, it's safe to say that the Gladius G0975 provides roughly twice the performance of tablets based on the popular Intel Atom N2600 processor. And looking at RuggedPCReview's performance...

types of SSDs. Here, while the non-specified mSATA SSD module used in the Gladius G0975 was very quick, it's not among the fastest we have tested. In daily live use, the Gladius tablet feels very quick and responsive and certainly up to its intended jobs. Power consumption Sometimes it seems like determining what kind of battery life one can realistically expect from a mobile computer is more difficult than figuring out the expected gas mileage of a vehicle. On the surface it seems simple: if you know the battery's capacity in watt-hours and...

What do those power draw figures mean in terms of projected battery life? According to BatteryMon, the Gladius battery had a capacity of 32.7 watt-hours, which is about as much as the original Apple iPad Air. That's more than adequate for a frugal ARM-based tablet, but not very much for a Wintel tablet. Dividing the 32.7 watt-hours by the 8.2 watt minimum draw means 4 hour battery life with the system staying awake the whole time. Adding the optional secondary internal battery would add another 16.35 watt-hours, thus raising theoretical...

The first picture below shows the two tablets in bright sunshine outdoors in a semi-shaded area with plenty of contrasts. Both screes have their brightness cranked up to the max. What's instantly obvious are the harsh mirror-like refection on the iPad, whereas the Gladius screen shows none. When switching the position of the tablets, the matte anti-glare screen of the Gladius mutes the reflections by diffusing them. In the picture collection below, when viewed from the right, both tablets work well. Viewed from the left, the iPad shows...