The MC70 is Symbol’s, I mean Motorola’s, rugged little Enterprise Digital Assistant (EDA). It’s perfect for field sales personnel who need to carry all of their customer data, and catalog information, cell phone, calendar and email in one small package. Sym… excuse me, Motorola, squeezed a lot into its ruggedized frame:

• 3.5 inch QVGA screen,
• scanner (your choice of 1D laser or 2D image capture),
• cell phone,
• 802.11 transceiver, and
• alpha numeric or full QWERTY keyboards.
• 64 megs of RAM standard, 128 meg available 
• 128 megs of flash memory, or 128 megs of both.

It’s also a tough little road warrior, but more about that in a minute. You can get the entire set of specs by downloading a data sheet here. Motorola also makes a wide array of accessories from DEX and printer cables to belt clips, single and four-bay cradles, truck cradles, battery toasters, and a lot of other things you’ll find listed here.

The built-in scanner is a solid workhorse that allows for scan intensive software like our own Mobiquity Sell™, which is important, because this application really shines when you build orders by scanning bar codes (either at the shelf or from a sheet of bar codes) and entering quantities via the numeric keypad. Orders with hundreds of line items can be built very quickly this way.

The unit I tested sports the laser scanner and 26 key numeric keyboard, which is all you need for an application where you’re keying in mainly numeric values. If you use an application that requires a lot of text entry, however, you’ll want to choose the full QWERTY version.

The small form factor means that it will slip easily into your pocket. At only 6 inches long and a little over 3 inches wide and 1.5 inches deep, and less than a pound (between 11.2 and 14 ounces, depending on the features) the MC70 is ready to ride along in your coat pocket, brief case or belt clip. Where ever you keep it, it won’t get in your way. At 3.1 inches wide, the unit fits nicely in your hand. The back of the unit is also ergonomically shaped. The battery door is raised and rounded, making a natural resting place for your finger. This area is covered by a rubber grip for extra traction. All of this makes one-handed operation feel natural and secure. The double thickness of the extended battery enhances this feature, and almost seems to be a pistol grip. Now, I don’t mean to sound like I’m writing ad copy for Motorola here, but I really like this little guy. For instance, when designing a small unit, one place they could have skimped is the screen size, but they didn’t. The 3.5 inch screen is bright and big enough to be easy to read.

The cell phone feature is easy to access by pressing the phone key. You instantly get the Windows Mobile 5 cell phone interface. The call quality is great. You can use the phone in two modes: Speaker phone and handset. The speaker is loud enough to hear in quiet to moderately noisy environments. Using it as a handset, I was able to clearly hear in very noisy environments. The microphone employs sound dampening technology that filters out background noise. I tested the phone while standing next to a van running a generator. I could barely hear myself think, but the microphone picked up my voice and canceled out most of the background noise. I was very impressed by the sound quality.

All of this technology doesn’t mean much however, if you’re constantly repairing or replacing the things. The MC70 has been designed to handle the rough stuff. It’s rated to survive repeated 4 foot drops to concrete and 1000 1.6 foot tumbles. It also sports an IP54 rating. That means it will survive dust storms, rain storms and splashing from any direction. Motorola says the TCO is very low, and I’m inclined to believe them. All in all the MC70 is a very well thought out piece of equipment. Your mobile sales force will love it because it’s small, easy to carry and easy to use. You’ll like it because it’s rugged enough to stay in the field, working hard.

Now, with all this functionality (scanner, Bluetooth, cell phone, 802.11) we expected a big drain on the battery. The battery we tested was the standard 1900 mAh. When we put the unit through a simulated route day, I became concerned when I saw the battery gauge drop by about 10% after using the scanner 100 times to build the first sales order. This didn't bode well. However, as I completed the test, the battery gauge didn't move so fast.  After completing a simulated day of ten stops and creating an order with 100 scans at each stop, the gauge still showed 57% of total battery life. So I used the scanner another 1000 times and it still had 40% of it's life. This really surprised me, because we'd found that with the cell phone and Bluetooth options active, just leaving it off the cradle overnight drained 70% of the power in the standard battery. So if you're doing 2000 scans in a day you should be fine.  I still recommend having a backup battery for safety's sake. The more options you have the more power you'll need, and proper battery maintenance is still a must. I also found that leaving the unit in an unpowered cradle will quickly drain the battery. In 30 minutes it dropped from 40% to 26%. Motorola makes an extended battery with 3800 mAh for greater insurance.

OK, so what are the bad things? Well, at first we thought it seemed to randomly slow down. That is, it does seem to hang from time to time, but on further investigation, we discovered that this doesn’t have to do with the MC70, it has to do with the operating system. It’s part of WM5’s effort to provide data persistence. You can read the whole story here.

There was one option I’d like to see available, and that’s a camera. Not everyone will find this feature useful, but there are plenty of companies who could use the ability to snap a picture of the shelf space at a particular customer location.

Well that’s about it on the Motorola MC70. Overall we like this unit very much. We think you will too.

Brett Birdsong
Sr. Editor