Motorola WT4000 wearable terminal. It looks a lot older than it is. This thing was sold from 2006 to 2013.
[An image of a Motorola WT4000 is shown. it has a panel of 15 buttons to the right of the device. It has a panel of 5 buttons on the left side. In the middle is an LCD display. There are 3 buttons under the display.]
I saw a video from Voidstar Labs on YouTube where Zach Freedman made a wearable thing like this that also had modular attachments that could be added, like a flash light or IR blaster. Shit was rad.
Reading all the comments reminiscing about using these as if they are now a relic of a bygone era. We errr… Still use them to this day, I don’t believe the company has any plans to upgrade in the near future either.
We also still use dot-matrix printers. They’re still being manufactured to this day and the new ones even come with ethernet ports! (As opposed to serial, which again we still have some)
We used to use these where I work. They look cool, but they run Windows Mobile and don’t have a touch screen so they actually were very cumbersome to use. Luckily we only had to use them to scan barcodes and that app automatically loaded on boot, unless they fucked up. Rock solid, but also made me hate every moment I had to use them, especially when the scanner attachment wouldn’t register.
There’s a lot of wearable/durable tech made for warehouse workers. I wish I had the money to buy all the awesome things I find. They’re still semi usable with new software. A lot run on the “mobile” windows architecture which takes Unix/Linux naively.
They’re made by Zebra who bought the Symbol barcode reader company, who bought the Motorola mobile computer business. The hardware is basically the same though.
Yeah, but they are only marginally better. It’s like moving from a hopelessly out of date platform to one that is only five years old. Is it better than what you had? Without a doubt. Does that make it good? Fuck no.
No, they’re a lot better. The touch screen is actually usable and Android is incredibly much better than WinCE 7. Is it better than a mobile phone? No. Is it much much more durable than a mobile phone? Yes.
They weren’t these exact models when I was there in 2013-2014, but they’re definitely similar. The finger scanner thing was so cool; I was always playing with it when there weren’t any packages coming down the conveyor.
FedEx used their own custom version that booted directly into the proprietary scanner system. The new version uses Android (probably 10 or lower) and does the exact same thing. Also, the scanner attachment is now Bluetooth, which only seems like an upgrade until you give it more than one second of thought and realize how easy they are to lose.
Magnetic tape is still a thing, particularly for long-term data storage. If you want to keep some data around for longer than most humans live, store it on magnetic tape.
Yeah, but a lot of companies started storing their records on magnetic tape when that became a thing, and it’s more for continuity purposes. It’s still the lowest cost, highest capacity, longest durability solution for archival purposes.
These also look like they can take a couple of good knocks and keep functioning. You don’t really want sleek and glass covered like the new modern looking phones for a warehouse.
That too. LCDs meant for industrial use are indeed more robust and made to last. Not only screens of course. Glass or carbon reinforced plastics are used commonly due to really good properties where it can take a beating but remain flexible without cracking. Like you said, metal and glass don’t combine well.
I remember using something like this - they can hook up to a barcode scanner you wear on your finger
You had to strap them really tight on your arm, if you didn't the weight of the device would make it rotate around and have the screen point away from you
I have the same problem with my watch. I could tighten it but then it starts to hurt. Anyways I keep it just loose enough to be comfortable but tight enough I can correct it every half hour.
I don’t think “wrist LoJak-a-mater” was meant to be the name of the device, I think it’s just the name of the device’s tracking feature and the author of the fandom page is jumping to conclusions.
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