An outdoor e-ink tablet

Smartphones, tablets and laptops are great when you're sitting on the couch or running around the city, but they aren't as great in the wilderness where cellular service disappears and bright sunlight renders LCD screens near-illegible. The Earl is a tablet designed to skirt around those shortcomings and keep you connected in the deepest of backcountry terrain. 

The Earl is an Android 4.1-based tablet that uses a 6-inch LG e-ink display. The display uses energy frugally, allowing for up to 20 hours of battery life. The designers thought of the weekend backpacker with that battery life, but the built-in solar panel on the backside can keep it running on longer trips.

The Earl uses a 50-channel GPS/GLONASS/WAAS chipset that tracks up to 20 satellites at once and delivers accuracy of up to about 3 meters. Using its internal magnetometer, accelerometer and gyroscope, the Earl can keep track of your position and route even in dense jungle and urban environments that lack a clear line of sight to the satellites above. The Earl also incorporates an FRS/GPRS/MUR two-way radio that lets you communicate with other radios up to 32 km away. The tablet can send text and voice messages and information like weather, location and route. 

Outdoor-device standards like the NOAA weather radio, barometer and thermometer are joined by an anemometer and hygrometer. The Earl is able to provide current temperature, barometric pressure, humidity, and wind speed and direction. It can also give you the location of where the sun, moon and stars will be the brightest.

Since it was created to be used outside, the Earl is a bit more rugged and grizzled than the average tablet. It uses a waterproof case that can hold its breath in 91 cm of water for 30 minutes. It is also dust-, shock- and mud-proof and works in temperatures between 0 and 50ºC and altitudes as high as 12,192 m. It recharges via USB or the aforementioned integrated solar panel.

Source: gizmag.comAdded: 15 May 2013