The picture to the right shows beats cyber monday Cedar CT4 from the front and from all four sides. It's a ruggedly handsome, elegant design along the lines of some of the more stylish tools for jobs and in the field. Our eval was black beatsixukcyberixukmonday 2VDAW552 bright orange, with the orange making the device easy to see and find. 2U7MBZB5 Tree will also ship other colors.Going around the Cedar CT4 there isn't much to see. This is an IP68-sealed device, and that means the fewer openings that must be sealed against immersion the better.The left side has a number of physical push buttons: Power, volume up and volume down, and a PTT (Push-To-Talk) button. On the right side are the unit's earphone jack and micro-USB port, each under a separate thick rubber plug. Nothing on the top or the bottom.The front of the CT4 has the display whose surface glass, as is usually the case with capacitive touch devices, extends well past the actual LCD screen perimeter. Beneath the display are three controls, a physical Home key flanked by a Menu touch area on the left and a Back touch area on the right, both very faint. That's a bit different from the usual three standard Android buttons/touch areas (Back, Home, and Multitask), and the "Menu" Android button officially vanished with version 4.0. We liked the physical Home button, as it works under any and all environmental conditions. The reason why devices like the Cedar CT4 exist is that over the past few years form has stopped following function in smartphone design.
Mobile phones are supposed to be small, handy devices (in most European countries the word for mobile phone is actually "handy") that fit anywhere and can be used anywhere. That, with all due respect to Apple and Samsung et al, is no longer possible with today's giant waver-thin consumer phones.The Cedar CT4, on the other hand, is very clearly a tool for the job. It looks like something you'd get at the local Home Depot and not in a boutique-like Apple store. But is that impression more than skin-deep? Let's find out. The compartment has a removable plastic cover held in place via two thumb screws and a tongue-and-groove pressure seal to keep dust and liquids out.The housing of the impressively solid phone consists of a very rigid black polycarbonate box with an alloy frame in it, an intricate orange back cover, and an orange polycarbonate front bezel.Opening the housing requires a Torx T5 screw driver. There are eight little Torx screws that securely fasten the back cover. This is a time where US telecommunications carriers do whatever it takes to lock in subscribers to long-term contracts, long-term phone purchase installment plans for locked phones, and the outright purchase price for a phone that'll quickly be obsolete exceeds that of many giant-screen HDTVs. It's also a time where phones are growing ever larger, to the extent where a clash with tablets seems inevitable and it's no longer clear what belongs on a tablet and what on a phone.
And it's a time where Windows Mobile (now called Windows Embedded Handheld) continues to be cyber monday beats in traditional vertical markets even though consumer markets have long since moved on to iPhones and the Android juggernaut it fostered, and some to newer Microsoft phones that are not compatible with the older mini OS. So where does this inexpensive, unlocked rugged Android phone fit in?There is no definite answer to that. Cedar Tree Technologies seems a company 81Y62ZU4 of seasoned professionals from the field of rugged handheld computing who asked themselves the above questions. And then concluded it might make sense to provide a place where customers would find not only expertise in their field and ways of doing business, but also innovative hardware at prices far below the level customary in traditional vertical markets. There no longer being clear boundaries between handhelds and tablets in terms of size and areas of deployment, the folks at Cedar decided to offer three very different choices, one being a tiny minimalist phone, another (their CT7) large enough to clearly be a tablet and not a phone, and then the CT4 which fits smack in the middle of what late 2014 is considered a phone. There are differences, of course. The CT4, as a ruggedized device, is 0.83 inches thick, and weighs 9.6 ounces. That's considerably thicker and heavier than today's consumer smartphones, but it's actually no thicker or heavier than Microsoft platform Pocket PCs from cyberz9Áumondayz9Áubeats J541LLV7 likes of Casio or Compaq used to be, and those were not rugged devices and had much smaller screens.The picture to the right also shows how the CT4 compares in thickness to the iPhone 6+.As far as ruggedness goes, in this era of ever larger and slimmer phones that flex and bend, the difference between consumer products and truly rugged devices has never been bigger. There are, however, some consumer phone companies, such as Samsung, that now offer "active" versions of their phones that look hardly different from a standard issue model but are largely waterproof. And the first thing most consumers do when they get a new phone is buy a case for it.The Cedar CT4, on the other hand, is unabashedly rugged. While Cedar isn't publishing as many ruggedness specs as we'd like to see, the CT4 is IP68-sealed (which means it's completely waterproof) and it can handle 10-foot drops. And there's Gorilla Glass, and corner guards beats107aby107adre107acyber107amonday LA2UE301 protective doors. It's definitely rugged. There's a gigabyte of LPDDR RAM and 4GB of Flash for storage. If 4GB seems modest to Apple aficionados compared to the usual 16/64/128GB in their iPhones, the amount of built-in storage hardly matters if the device can use expansion cards. So for the CT4 it's the 4GB plus what's in its user-accessible (and well-sealed) micro SDHC card slot.There is an 8mp documentation beats by dre cyber monday camera with LED flash on the backside, and a 1.2mp vidcam in the front. While there's recently been a drive to push the megapixel count by some manufacturers in an effort to differentiate themselves, this pixel count is what Apple uses in its iPhone 6 and 6 Plus, and it compares favorable with most rugged smartphones/handhelds out there.Cedar claims the unit's non-removable 11.3 watt-hour Li-Ion battery, which so happens to be of the same capacity as that of the iPhone 6 Plus, allows all-day operation.
Charging is via a standard micro-USB port. Whether or not to use capacitive touch in industrial devices has been an intense topic of discussion, with the major argument against it that the technology doesn't work in the rain or with gloves on.While that is mostly true, it rains for consumers, too, and that hasn't stopped consumer market capacitive touch smartphones selling by the hundreds of millions. Fact is, the elegance and ease of use of capacitive touch make it a technology where the benefits outweigh the limitations.Like almost all modern smartphones, the CT4 senses what's going on and can react accordingly. There's a 3-axis accelerometer for motion-dependent apps and functionality, an e-compass, and an ambient light sensor to adjust backlight intensity. Wired connectivity is via micro-USB 2.0. NEW YORK (TheStreet) -- Google (GOOG) has been trying to get a foothold in the growing streaming TV business for a number of years. Early attempts at challenging Apple (AAPL) TV, Roku and other similar offerings failed miserably, but last year's introduction of the wildly successful Chromecast finally opened the door. The the new $99 Nexus Player is Google's best attempt to try and take market share away from Apple, Roku, Amazon (AMZN) and others in the streaming media space.In addition to being able to stream TV, movies and music, the Asus-manufactured Nexus Player is also a gaming console, with dozens of titles already available from the Google's store. To get the most out of those games, you'll probably need to buy the $40 Gamepad. As for the actual device, don't think of bringing an unboxed Nexus Player to an ice rink, as it looks a lot like a hockey puck. The Nexus Player is small, round, black and flat. It's 4.72 inches round by less than an inch thick and weighs slightly more than 8 ounces.Powering the puck is a sophisticated 1.8 GHz, quad-core Intel (INTC) Atom processor tied to a 2D/3D Power VR Series 6 graphics system from Britain's Imagination Technologies. There's 1GB of RAM and only 8GB of storage, which could limit the ultimate number of games you can keep in your device. Internet connections are handled only via Wi-fi (802.11ac) because there's no Ethernet port. 1080p video and digital audio output is via HDMI although there's no HDMI cable in the box.The Nexus Player comes beats by dre cyber monday sale a very simple remote control that's different than others out there. It connects to the console via Bluetooth (4.1) instead of the usual infrared, line-of-sight technology. That means you can better hide the console than with other, similar devices. If you prefer, there's also an Android app to help handle those chores from a smartphone or tablet and it works with with Android, iOS, Mac, Windows and Chromebook devices.It comes with all of the Google apps you would expect including Play, Music, Movies, TV, Games and, of course, YouTube. There's also the usual Netflix (NFLX) , Hulu Plus, iHeartRadio, Pandora (P) , Vevo and lots more. But, because the Android TV platform is still in its infancy there are many apps (for instance, Time Warner Cable's Y5MQK0LD offering) which you might find on some other platforms but aren't yet available for these new devices.