Truckcom Blog

So if you want to use a system like Truckcom, should you use ruggedised, industrial devices  or the cheaper “phone” grade devices?

The best answer we can come up with is this: Use whichever you’re most comfortable with. Truckcom is fully compatible with both kinds of device; so really the choice of which sort to use (and therefore how much you spend on devices) is very much a financial decision for you – after all, they will be your devices.

Ruggedised devices represent a larger investment (they are substantially more expensive than smartphones) but can be expected to last longer. There are rumours of ruggedised devices in service with some of the parcel carriers which have lasted 8 or 9 years. Smartphones almost certainly won’t last that long, but can be expected to last about 3 years. Often if phone devices have been provided to you by one of the networks as part of a contract with them, they’ll expect to replace them at that stage anyway.

Among our customers to date, economy seems to be the main factor governing which devices they use, and smartphones are a firm favourite. Given the price differential with ruggedised devices, you’d need to lose or break several smartphones before your out of pocket compared with ruggedised device costs, and in practice the smartphone devices do the job just fine at a far lower cost. But I have to come back to the previous answer as the bottom line – this is a customer choice, and we recommend you use whichever style of device you’re most comfortable with.

A final factor in device choice is the exact use you intend it for. Some operators need to be able to scan barcodes out on the road. If you need this, you will need a ruggedised style device, because none of the smartphone grade devices include barcode readers.

What’s your experience in use of different kinds of devices in practice? We’re interested in your comments.

(related posts – Truckcom Mobile is now available on Android and The £40 Smartphone has arrived)

When we first designed Truckcom, several years ago, the central idea was to use the mobile devices as the heart of the system. The people we were competing against then (and almost as much now) were doing something very different – they were bolting a black box into each vehicle and then tracking that.

But we thought there was a lot more flexibility in using ‘phones. Two different kinds of flexibility:

1. It’s really easy to move the devices between different vehicles. If you have a hire vehicle on your fleet for a day, you can still track it; and if you change a vehicle on your fleet, there are no removal/refitting costs with Truckcom – unlike with the black box people.

2. You can do so much more with a mobile device, with a touch-screen, than you can with just a black box. The black boxes can maybe get some engine data from the vehicle, and maybe get a key entry from the driver to see which driver is in the vehicle, but that’s it. With a smartphone, you can get the same kind of geographic tracking, but you have lots of other possibilities that offer themselves:

• On-screen signatures – or “Electronic POD” as we’ve called it on our website. Easy to do with a smartphone, and it then takes care of a major headache in a lot of logistics businesses – the paper trail of delivery notes.
• On-screen vehicle checks. If your driver needs a device for voice calls, tracking, electronic POD etc. anyway, why not get them to record legally required vehicle checks on them as well. Pretty much all our customers do this – so it must be quite a good idea….
• … and of course SatNav. Easy to do, and cheap compared with a standalone device – so well worth considering. Of course you might want some of these options but not others, and of course that’s fine.

The striking thing about what has happened with mobile devices is how far they’ve developed right into our zone. Back in 2004, when we started, you couldn’t get any devices with built in Satnav receivers – it was the dreaded Bluetooth GPSs (and yes, they were a bit of a pain). Now, pretty much every smartphone device out there has a built in Satnav receiver – so we can track it on a map, and it can support commercial Satnav software, such as TomTom or CoPilot.

And now Smartphones are big news. Thanks to our friends at Apple, the world and their wives now have an iPhone – it’s a phenomenon. While iPhones are not that relevant to Truckcom (they’re expensive devices – we prefer the far cheaper and less “designer” windows and Android handsets) they have sparked mainstream interest in this sort of technology. Now lots of people can see how powerful a mobile device can be – and it sets them thinking how they could be used in different ways.