Orchard unveils the Toughlet rugged tablet with a Pixel Qi display

One can easily spot the superfluity of tablets on the market today; however only a handful of rugged slates exist out there. Nevertheless, rugged or not, tablets are still among the hottest products and it is always exciting to see what novelties various companies come up with, given the above-mentioned overabundance.

Orchard is the next manufacturer to introduce a rugged tablet. Dubbed Toughlet, this portable device is powered by a Freescale iMX5 ARM Cortex-A8 CPU that has two processing cores clocked at 1.2GHz. In addition, the Toughlet will ship with a 7-inch Pixel Qi scratch-resistant Corning Gorilla Glass panel that can reportedly be utilized as a full color LCD display or as a high-contrast sunlight-viewable display (once you turn off the backlight).

Connectivity features include Wireless LAN and Bluetooth adapters accompanied by optional 3G or 4G antennas. Furthermore, customers will be provided with 2GB of internal DDR3 memory, IR, RFID, dual SDXC card slots, a dedicated flashlight button and a Google Android operating system. According to various sources, Orchard will also release webOS and Windows 8-based models sometime in the future.                

Apparently, the Toughlet is indeed quite tough. It has a solid titanium/aluminum alloy case, a NiZn battery that handles higher temperatures well and comes with a technology called weatherLox, which supposedly protects against dust and water ingress into the tablet.

Orchard will start manufacturing their latest slate in Q2 of this year.

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