07/18/07 Handheld Ag PC

Handheld Ag PC. I'm Greg Martin with today's Line On Agriculture. I've always felt that the words personal computer or PC and farming were complete opposites. But thanks to a new product available, the PC has a new place on the farm and in the field. Brian Stark is the marketing director with Farm Works Software who has just introduced a rugged new handheld PC. STARK: The device is called the Titan RH and the RH in the name stands for rugged handheld. Basically it's a device that a person would take out the field and using our software, the Site Mate software; use that to map out field boundaries or soil samples. You can do variable rate application with it. PC's do not like a lot of rough handling and according to Stark, that's not an issue any longer. STARK: One of the things that we've heard complaints about with just normal pocket pc's was that when you are using that pocket pc in the field, they're not really designed for the field and farmers can be pretty rough on things and you can drop a pocket pc and if the surface isn't fairly soft, you're going to break something. You're going to break a screen; you're going to break something. That can lead to a loss of valuable data. I've often discovered that in the long run, it's better to spend a bit more for equipment I use often. STARK: The pocket pc's are great from a standpoint that they are cheap. However, when you are in the field and you're doing soil sampling and that might be your profession where you are doing it every day, you just can't afford to be down to take the time to acquire another pocket pc and to get that going again. The new Titan RH includes GPS and is ready to use right out of the box. STARK: This one's a little unique from the standpoint in that when you purchase this hardware  when it comes out of the box, it has our software already preloaded on it. So when you charge it up for the first time and turn it on, you just type in your numbers for the products that you purchased. You just take it out of the box and start using it. More tomorrow on the Titan RH. That's today's Line On Agriculture. I'm Greg Martin on the Northwest Ag Information Network.