When your office is outdoors and you work under all sorts of weather conditions, you know what happens with your mobile phone: your touch screen stops working, your battery juice gets drained and we hardly even have to mention what happens when water finds its way into the device... For all the people who need a rugged device, a good choice might be Trimble Nomad 1050 with its phone casing that meets demanding MIL-STD-810G military standards for drops, vibration, humidity, altitude, and temperature extremes. It also comes with an IP68 rating, meaning it's "dust tight" and protected against complete, continuous submersion in water (in up to a meter of water for 240 minutes).

Display has a resolution of 480 x 640 pixels - you'll be happy with it even when exposed to direct sunlight. Below the cover there is a 1.0 GHz processor, 512 DDR SDRAM, 8GB onboard non-volatile NAND Flash, bluetooth, wifi, GPS, 5 megapixel resolution camera... Some of these are optional and will pump up the price pretty high. Prices for this device start at 449 dollars. For example: the version that includes GPS, Wi-Fi, WWAN, 5 megapixel camera, Barcode Imager, and MicroSDHC Slot, will cost you no less than 1249 dollars.

Nomad runs on Microsoft Windows Embedded Handheld (WEHH) 6.5 and battery should last for up to 15 hours.