I started working in the office this morning at 9:00 AM on the Motion J3400, but I forgot to bring in my power cable after the ABITE expo on the weekend.

So here I am at 1:30PM and there is 30% battery charge remaining. So that is 60% of one of the 2 batteries on board.

At this rate, I’ll be going flat at close the 3:00 PM mark at 6 hours.

I have not optimised my use to make battery life claims. I haven’t stopped yet for lunch and the screen is at full brightness. I’ve been docked with an external monitor and a wireless keyboard all day. WiFi is on and has been in use constantly. I haven’t been in standby or hibernate at all.

So this is why the Motion J3400 is a brilliant choice for field users. If you need a lightweight Tablet PC that can go all day without charging, then you should look at the J3400.

Of course with the hot swap dual battery setup on the J3400 you needn’t let a battery going flat stop you anyway… Just have a spare – they only take an hour and a half to charge!

We recently made the call that the Motion J3400 has the best outdoor display that we’ve seen to date. It’s time to retract that statement…

Motion Computing have now included their market leading display on the F5 and C5 Tablet PCs.

So now the J3400, C5 and F5 can all be shipped with the remarkable Hydis AFFS+ screen technology. The Hydis screen allows you to have a clear view in direct sunlight without the need for major battery draining backlighting.

That means:

• Awesome indoor and outdoor viewing
• Wide viewing angles
• Maximum battery life

This technology is a huge leap for Tablet PCs and it goes a long way to solving two of the biggest hurdles for Tablet PC deployments – battery life and screen viewing.

For a detailed explanation of screen brightness and outdoor screen technology, read out may post here.

We’ve been using the J3400 with the Hydis AFFS+ display for a few months now and we’re still impressed.

It’s great to see that Motion Computing are continuing to invest in their technology. We also expect to see new products and developments on the horizon from them.

Read the motion press release here.

Working in the field in direct sunlight has always been challenging. Most Tablet PC vendors now offer some sort of daylight readable display. Beware though, not all daylight displays are created equal.

Some hardware vendors try to pass off daylight readability in terms of brightness, and brightness is measured in nits. So you might see a claim like “500 nits outdoor display.”

We all love to measure things with numbers, but nits is not a good measure of daylight readability.

Simply cranking up the brightness with a stronger backlight on a display causes a number of issues:

1. Significantly reduced battery life
2. Washed out colours
3. Low contrast

The very best solution is actually a display that is readable on little to no brightness on.

In other words, the more readable it is with the least possible nits the better. To achieve the best outdoor readability, you need to address:

• Reflection – Minimising sunlight reflection with Anti-reflective screen coatings
• Diffusing – Reflective, transmissive and transflective technologies work to diffuse light out effectively
• Viewing angles – some achieve up to 180 degrees in all directions, so you can read the display easily at any angle
• Contrast – This is the true benchmark of daylight readability.

According to Rugged PC Review, the effective contrast of an outdoor display is:

1 + (emitted light / reflected light)

So if the reflected light is high, the emitted light needs to be higher just for the screen to be readable.

Getting reflection, diffusion, viewing angles and contrast right can mean that your display is readable outdoors with very little brightness to speak of.

The new motion J3400 is by far the best example of this. As we demonstrated in our product video, you can actually read this display in direct sunlight on the ZERO brightness setting.

That means that you can go out into the field and run much, much closer to the manufacturers claimed battery life of 7.5 hours.

The J3400 is actually the best outdoor readable screen that we’ve seen on a Tablet PC by far and it sports only 320nits. 

A display that has to run at 1000nits to be viewable will of course, not be so good on batteries. So if you have to sacrifice hours in the field just to be able to read the screen, how daylight readable is it really?