A Rugged PDA testing out Santa’s new sledge (Only rugged PDA’s are tough enough for the job!!)

Well it’s been a wonderful year for us at Rugged and Mobile.  Full of change, lots of challenges and loads of new and interesting projects and customer solutions delivered.  Of course we’ve blogged and written articles all the way along as well as join in all the chit chat with you, our blog readers so that we can share as much of our experience and trials and tribulations as we can!

We’ve decided to call time on 2012 this Friday, so we’re saying thank-you so much for joining in with us this year and may we extend our wishes for a wonderful Christmas and happy New Year to you all.

The job’s nowhere near done as far as teaching you all about Rugged PDA’s, tablets and Mobile Solutions is concerned, so we’ll be back in 2013, raring to go (If a little overweight from all the home cooked mince pies that have found their way into the office the past few weeks!) and looking forward to what will be a challenging but awsome year ahead.

Christmas wishes and love from

All the RAMblrs @ Rugged and Mobile

400 posts later and we’re still banging on about Rugged and Mobile Solutions!

So we’re 400 posts old!  and we all just wanted to say thank-you so much for coming and reading our Rugged Handheld blog.  Without our readers there’d be no point to what we do and we love all the comments, questions and emails you send in to us.

We also hit an average 1200 viewers per day this month, 700 being general viewers and the rest made up of email subscribers, tweeters and social/RSS readers.  It means we have a rough following of over 40,000 readers per month making us one of the biggest places to read, comment and discuss “Rugged PDA’s and Data capture!”

We’re changing hugely next year and the way we blog will reflect this.  Firstly we’ll be having a far nicer design applied to the blog very soon.  Like our website, it’s about 18 months overdue, we’ve been so busy we’ve had to put our customers and the conversations we have first but both sites will be wonderful new and unique places to go and learn everything you need to learn before spending your hard-earned cash!

You can probably tell the market we work in is changing hugely too so we’ll be splitting up the blog into 2 or 3 distinct areas to reflect what we really do here on a day-to-day basis.  Software in the shape of Windows Mobile, Android and IOS, Hardware both Rugged and Non Rugged and of course service/support and repair are all dear to our hearts and our daily bread here and we’ll be categorising the blog to reflect this far better along with putting up the news and opinion that makes us so different from everyone else.

So here’s to a superb 2013.  It’s going to be a challenging year, but a year full of exciting change too, so make sure you keep asking those questions, we’ll be right here ready to help!

Have a great Christmas, a wonderful New Year and remember to work hard when you get back!!

Dave and all the RAMblrs @ Rugged and Mobile.

Norman Jospeh Woodland Passesd away

I thought i’d interrupt the current series of blogs to pay our respects to Normal Joseph Woodland, who passed away on Friday 14th December at the grand old age of 91.  Norman worked with Bernard Silver came up with the idea of the barcode, way back in the 1940′s with the original patent for the concentric circle “Bulls Eye” barcode being made in 1949.

However the barcode was way ahead of its time and whilst it was a great way to ID products an efficient reading system was the challenge and it wasn’t until the early 1970′s when Woodlandjoined IBM in order to develop and use a laser based scanning system.  It was at this point the barcode system took the stage!

Wrigleys Jucy Fruit – The first ever barcode scanned

Launched in 1974, the first UPC based barcode was scanned on a pack of Wrigley’s chewing gum for 67 cents.  The rest is history with barcodes still today forming the basis of tracking products around the world.  To mark just how important this technology has served us over the years, Woodland was amongst some great names in technology who were honoured at the White House in the USA by then President Bush.Rest in peace and a big thank-you from everyone here at RAM for such a wonderful technology Norman!

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