Gadget Show Live 2009: Sonim

One of the stands that I thought was great was the Sonim stand. For those of you that are not familiar, Sonim have been busy carving out a successful niche as the leaders of the ruggedised handsets market. Actually that’s a bit unfair – they pretty much have their own category of “indestructible handsets” – given some of the treatment I saw dished out on handsets today, I have to say they aren’t rugged handsets – they are much tougher!!!

I should digress here slightly, and just dip in to the ruggedised handset video test we are going to do – just to say, it IS still happening, we’ve just been waiting on mobile video recording technology, which has changed substantially in the last few months – you can now get 1080p-HD recording devices for £160 – meaning we’ll get a LOT better results from the destruction of the ruggedised devices!

One of the rugged devices we’ll be testing is the Sonim XP1 – their first device. The pic you can see above is for their new device, the XP3 Enduro. This builds on the original device and is tougher than a two-dollar steak!! (one for our US audience there)

Sonim have very excitingly confirmed we’ll be getting one of these devices to do with as we wish – expect some suitably interesting “challenges” to be given to it…!

Anyhoo, Sonim have great plans for the coming year, with a handset roadmap that addresses the market segments they serve. There’s also a secret-squirrel annoucement in May that IntoMobile is going to be involved in… I can’t tell you more than that for now, other than to say there is going to video of it!

You can read more about Sonim, and buy their devices, via their site here.

Ben