This has become something of an area of expertise for me over the last 10 years owing to my profession and how much time I must spend in the wilderness.

I’ll do my very best to keep this brief but I can’t make any promises.

Rugged phones are generally a major compromise in one way or another. More often than not it is the camera where you have to be willing to accept compromise. It’s not so much quality; you can get a 108MP+ main sensor made by sony or samsung in most of these devices now. It’s the software behind the camera.

I’ve used rugged phones from pretty much every manufacturer in the space and it is a problem for all of them. You can generally run a GCAM port, but your 108mp array based sensor is now only capable of producing a 12MP image, and it isn’t fast enough to capture high quality photos of moving subjects. As a still camera they can now be absolutely spectacular. Google’s HDR algorithm and AI will crank out fantastic images and amazing lighting, but they can’t cope with movement and you won’t have any hardware based stabilisation. For some of us, that lack of hardware based stabilisation is actually an asset: strapped to a motorbike or vehicle across rough dirt roads, your iphone or galaxy will suicide its image stabilization sooner or later.

The other major compromise is not universal, but it is common. Performance.

Most of the players in this space will claim every new device as ‘flagship’, ‘flagship killer’ etc. In reality, many of them run something resembling a tick, tick, tick, TOCK cycle where they are forced to produce several low BOM devices (bill of materials) and sell them for far more than they are worth, before they produce something that actually builds and maintains their brand and reputation.

Before you put your money down, you need to build an awareness of this behaviour and learn the capability of some of the chipsets that you might not have come across before. Many of the newer mediatek dimensity chipsets are highly capable and will come very close to standing their ground against midrange or industrial snapdragon chipsets. Price is often the best indicator here. As with most things, if you want something decent then you must pay for it. If the price seems too good to be true, it is.

There are MAJOR advantages in this space for those that need them. My current phone only needs charging every 4 or 5 days. It came with a really well made charge dock that does not require me to daily defeat the rubberized gasket protecting the USB-C port from water and dust. It has a thermal camera with a focusing lens over it that allows me to spot koalas at a ridiculous distance, and it works well into the daylight after my $2400 thermal scope has become useless. It has a focused LED torch on the TOP of the device that I can turn on with a physical button. It has a 3.5 watt speaker on the rear that lets me make hands-free calls in stupidly loud environments, or listen to a podcast in the shed at high volume. There’s a 1TB MicroSD for all the time that I am out of service areas and a 3.5mm jack for when my ears are feeling saucy. It feels and looks like an extremely well made NUGGET of a thing, and it makes me happy to pull it out of my pocket. It rocks an industrial snapdragon chipset and is fast as fuck with a battery that WILL NOT QUIT. I could drop it from a fire tower and it would probably live.

It also cost me $1000AUD. It also weighs 400 grams. I also had to work directly with the manufacturer to get a firmware that would enable VoWifi in Australia. I also had to wipe my phone like 3 times to get it going. It was a total pain in the arse. Overall it is a fantastic piece of hardware that fits my weird needs almost perfectly, but unless you have a similarly weird set of requirements, would I recommend that you go down the same road? Probably not.

The day I retire I will pick up the sleekest, smallest device with the most ridiculously high-speed, high-quality camera I can get my hands on. Until that time, I have a genuine need for this ridiculousness including the battery life and all the other extras.

Having said that, I do feel like rugged phones are the only segment of the market that are still actually innovating and offering unique features. Foldables are cool, sure - but besides that, in terms of mainstream phones it really doesn’t matter what you buy! They’re all making the same rectangular glass slab. The features are identical, they’re just better or worse between models and brands. At least this segment of the market still has the balls to take some risks and offer crazy shit that some people need or want.

Like you, I jumped at the xcover pro, and then the xcover 6 pro. They both died spectacularly quickly and samsung did not come to the party with anything resembling honouring a warranty. Their warranty isn’t worth shit.

In comparison, when the fingerprint sensor died on my current device, AGM had a new phone in my hand in 4 days, and didn’t ask me to return the broken one until I’d received the replacement.

I won’t receive an android version update (just security updates). The camera makes me sad, and sometimes the data connectivity going in and out of service areas takes longer than I would like.

Just based on the content of your post, I would wager that you are better off with a device from a mainstream manufacturer in a heavy duty case. If your life is as weird as mine however, maybe it is worth looking into this segment a bit further. It is far from perfect, but when the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.

Continues…