GD Itronix Debuts Rugged GD8000 With Integrated Touchscreen

It’s officially rugged season. A week after Dell announced the Latitude E6400 XFR, General Dynamics Itronix has followed with the GD8000, a touchscreen military-grade 13-incher. GD Itronix’s last rugged notebook was the GoBook XR-1. The GD8000, which starts at $3,800, takes the screen size from 12.1 inches to 13.3. It weighs 7.9 pounds, which isn’t so bad when you remember it was built to survive 42-inch drops. Again, the 13.3-inch XGA display is is touch-enabled. (The idea of resistive touch on a 7.9-pound, non-convertible notebook doesn’t seem terribly useful to us, but we’ll reserve full judgment until we get hands on.) Its DynaVue technology is designed to make outdoor viewing easy, and at the same time conserve battery life while the brightness is cranked up. The rest of the durability claims are, as you’d expect, pretty badass: it can withstand 30 gallons of water blown at 40 miles per hour over a 4-hour period as well as helicopter-grade vibrations. Its internally sealed ports make it dustproof. In addition to a larger screen size, the GD8000 also ushers in DDR3 RAM, as opposed to DDR2 (users can add up to 4GB). The CPU is now 1.86-GHz, as opposed to 1.6-GHz. It comes standard with a nine-cell battery, which GD Itronix says can last up to 10 hours. The 120GB hard drive is removable. When it comes to connectivity, the GD8000 has a few options: a GPS receiver, 802.11n Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and optional Gobi 2000. Security features include TPM 1.2 circuitry and an optional fingerprint reader. The GD8000 starts at $3,800 and is available now.