Durabook R11 Review | PCMag

The Durabook R11 (starts at $1,849; $2,877 as tested) won’t help you with a passive-aggressive boss or annoying co-worker, but this rugged tablet is an excellent pick for anyone whose job places them and their computer in harm’s way, from military personnel and law enforcement to first responders and factory workers. This 11.6-inch tablet is surprisingly thin and light for a fully rugged machine, and it’s also the first rugged tablet or laptop we’ve seen with 12th Generation Intel silicon. While it's quite expensive compared with mainstream tablets, and the optional keyboard only adds to the bill, fleet managers might be able to mitigate these costs when buying in bulk. You’ll also want to buy an extra battery because the R11’s runtime is less than you might like. With that in mind, if your line of work requires a fully rugged tablet, the Durabook R11 is a rare rugged example that’s also sleek and modern.

Thin and Light Yet Fully Rugged

Durabook R11 models start at $1,849 for a Core i5-based system with 8GB of memory (RAM) and a 256GB solid-state drive (SSD). Our test model features the Core i7-1255U processor (CPU) and 16GB of RAM and costs $2,378. The optional iKey Detachable Backlit Keyboard costs $499, which brings the price of our complete test system to $2,877.

(Credit: Kyle Cobian)

Designed to be used under harsh conditions, the Durabook R11 holds both the MIL-STD-810H and MIL-STD-461F certifications, so it can withstand drops, shocks, vibrations, and temperature extremes. The tablet also has an IP66 rating for protection against dust, dirt, and water ingress. While it can withstand getting splashed or even a strong jet of water, it’s water-resistant but not waterproof. An IP67 rating is required for being seen as waterproof to the point it could survive being submerged in water. Still, the Durabook R11 is fully rugged and able to withstand more abuse than semi-rugged models, such as the Acer Enduro Urban N3 and the Dell Latitude 5430 Rugged.

(Credit: Kyle Cobian)

Most fully rugged tablets and laptops are hulking, bulky affairs. And while the Durabook R11 won’t be confused with an iPad, it’s rather trim and sleek among its rugged ilk. It measures 0.79 by 11.7 by  7.6 inches (HWD) and weighs 2.8 pounds. The closest competitor to it is the Getac F110, which is a fully rugged 11.6-inch tablet that’s half a pound heavier at 3.3 pounds and larger in every dimension at 0.98 by 12.4 by 8.15 inches.

Durabook's biggest clue that the R11 is a fully rugged tablet is the thick rubber bumpers on each of its corners. Thinner rubber bumpers also line the front edge of the laptop to help protect the display from face-down falls. These rubber pieces help the tablet survive drops of up to four feet.

(Credit: Kyle Cobian)

Rugged protection is not the only item needed for work in the field. A bright display that can be viewed in direct sunlight is also required. Meeting this demand, the Durabook R11 features a bright display that’s rated for 1,000 nits of brightness. To put that figure in perspective, most consumer laptops feature displays somewhere between 250 and 500 nits. Here, I'm able to view content on the Durabook R11’s display outside on a sunny day, and I don't even need to turn the display’s brightness all the way up.

Durabook's 11.6-inch touch panel features full HD (1,920-by-1,080-pixel) resolution. That’s plenty of pixels on a relatively small display, which produces crisp-looking text and images. Likewise, colors appear accurate but are not the most vibrant I've seen.

This display has three touch response modes—finger/water, glove, and stylus—that are accessible from Durabook’s QuickMenu on the Windows taskbar. From this QuickMenu, you can also program the three touch-sensitive buttons that sit on the display bezels: The P button is on the left bezel, the camera/barcode button is on the right bezel, and the D button is on the bottom bezel.

(Credit: Kyle Cobian)

By default, the P button is programmed to enter Stealth mode, which turns off the display and overly bright status LEDs on the top bezel while also muting the volume. However, you can also set it for Night Vision mode that basically does the same thing but keeps the display barely visible at an incredibly dim 1.7 nits.

The camera/barcode button can launch either the barcode scanner or the camera app, while the D button can be used to switch among the three touch-screen modes. You can also set any of the three touch-sensitive buttons to open and close the QuickMenu. With no obvious way to close the QuickMenu window, I advise using one of the buttons to launch and, more important, exit out of the QuickMenu. Last, QuickMenu lets you program the volume rocker on the right edge to control volume or display brightness.

(Credit: Kyle Cobian)

Our test unit is outfitted with the optional barcode scanner along with the standard front- and rear-facing webcams. Both cameras can capture 1,920-by-1,080-pixel photos and 1080p video. I am happy to see the front-facing cam captures crisper, better-balanced video than a grainy 720p cam.

The Durabook R11 is built for serious work, so I can’t fault its subpar audio output too much, but it has only a lone speaker, and the mono sound is truly terrible. This is not a tablet for watching shows and movies unless you have headphones.

The Optional Keyboard Is Rugged, Too

Grouped on the tablet’s right edge, the Durabook R11’s ports are behind a cover that’s a bit difficult to pry open but is certainly a tight seal and excellent protection. With some effort, you can flip down the cover to reveal a USB-C port with Thunderbolt 4 support, a USB Type-A port, a micro HDMI port, a microSD card slot, a SIM card slot, and an audio jack. These ports should cover most—if not all—of your needs without a dongle or adapter required. The power connector resides on the bottom panel and, oddly, doesn’t have a cover to protect it.

(Credit: Kyle Cobian)

This rugged tablet comes with a stylus and strap to help prevent you from losing it—however, you'll find no spot to garage or otherwise stash the stylus. Likewise, Durabook did not include a spot to affix the strap to the tablet other than the Kensington lock slot on the tablet’s left edge. This arrangement is not beneficial if you are right-handed. The Getac F110 is better at incorporating its stylus. Not only can you connect the stylus strap to the right edge of the Getac tablet, but you can also store it in a slot on the tablet’s bottom panel.

(Credit: Kyle Cobian)

Our Durabook R11 test system includes the company’s iKey Detachable Backlit Keyboard, which is an optional accessory that costs $499. Two large captive screws keep the keyboard securely attached to the tablet. The keyboard contains two-level backlighting that glows in a soft red color. The keys are small and more difficult to press than what you are probably used to on a regular laptop, and likewise, the touchpad is tiny and flanked by the left and right mouse buttons. This is not a keyboard for drafting long documents and emails. Touch typists will have a difficult time with the dedicated effort required to depress each undersized key. The tradeoff is that the ruggedness of the keyboard matches that of the tablet itself, and is likely designed for small spurts of messaging.

(Credit: Kyle Cobian)

While not hot-swappable, the battery is removable from the tablet’s bottom panel. Given the limited runtime, you would benefit from having an extra battery on hand. Without hot swapping, however, when in the field you will need to power down the Durabook R11 to change batteries.

(Credit: Kyle Cobian)

Testing the Durabook R11: A Sprinter, Not a Marathoner

Our Durabook R11 test system is based on the Core i7-1255U, a CPU from Intel’s 12th Gen “Alder Lake” U series of efficient, 15-watt mobile chips. Featuring Intel’s new hybrid architecture, it has two Performance cores, eight Efficient cores, and a total of 12 processing threads. For our performance tests, we're comparing the R11 with two rugged Windows-based tablets from Getac, the F110 and the Getac S410 G4, as well as two rugged laptops: the Durabook Z14I and the Panasonic Toughbook 40.

Productivity Tests 

UL's PCMark 10, our first benchmark, simulates a variety of real-world productivity and content-creation workflows to measure overall performance for office-centric tasks such as word processing, spreadsheeting, web browsing, and videoconferencing. We also run PCMark 10's Full System Drive test to assess the load time and throughput of a laptop's storage. (See more about how we test laptops.)

Three more benchmarks focus on the CPU, using all available cores and threads, to rate a PC's suitability for processor-intensive workloads. Maxon's Cinebench R23 uses that company's Cinema 4D engine to render a complex scene, while Geekbench 5.4 Pro by Primate Labs simulates popular apps ranging from PDF rendering and speech recognition to machine learning. Finally, we use the open-source video transcoder HandBrake 1.4 to convert a 12-minute video clip from 4K to 1080p resolution (lower times are better). 

Our last productivity test is PugetBench for Photoshop(Opens in a new window) by Puget Systems, which uses the Creative Cloud version 22 of Adobe's famous image editor to rate a PC's performance for content creation and multimedia applications. It's an automated extension that executes a variety of general and GPU-accelerated Photoshop tasks ranging from opening, rotating, resizing, and saving an image to applying masks, gradient fills, and filters.

The Durabook R11’s performance on our productivity and content creation tests shows the gains you receive when moving to Intel’s 12th Gen chips from the previous generation. This Durabook came out faster than its 11th Gen rugged competition on every test save Photoshop, on which the Panasonic 40 finished first by a mile, likely thanks to its generous 64GB of RAM. What these results show is that the Durabook R11 is well-prepared for most general tasks, including word processing, spreadsheet crunching, and document manipulation among others.

Graphics Tests 

We test Windows PC graphics with two DirectX 12 gaming simulations from UL's 3DMark, Night Raid (more modest, suitable for laptops with integrated graphics) and Time Spy (more demanding, suitable for gaming rigs with discrete GPUs). 

Additionally, we run two tests from the cross-platform GPU benchmark GFXBench 5, which stresses both low-level routines like texturing and high-level, game-like image rendering. The 1440p Aztec Ruins and 1080p Car Chase tests, rendered offscreen to accommodate different display resolutions, exercise graphics and compute shaders using the OpenGL programming interface and hardware tessellation respectively. The more frames per second (fps), the better.

A rugged tablet is rarely—if ever—the right choice for creative professionals, and the Durabook R11 is certainly geared toward productivity work rather than intensive 3D graphics tasks. Its scores on 3DMark and GFXBench (it was able to complete one of our GFXBench tests but not the other) place it in the middle of this pack of rugged tablets and laptops with integrated Intel Iris Xe graphics. It suffices to say that you should look elsewhere if you need graphical power in a field work setting.

Battery and Display Tests

We test laptop battery life by playing a locally stored 720p video file (the open-source Blender movie Tears of Steel(Opens in a new window)) with display brightness at 50% and audio volume at 100%. We make sure the battery is fully charged before the test, with Wi-Fi and keyboard backlighting turned off. 

To further evaluate a laptop or tablet's display, we also use a Datacolor SpyderX Elite monitor calibration sensor and its Windows software to measure a laptop screen's color saturation—what percentage of the sRGB, Adobe RGB, and DCI-P3 color gamuts or palettes the display can show—and its 50% and peak brightness in nits (candelas per square meter).

The Durabook R11 lasted only a few minutes more than seven hours on our battery drain test, which is the shortest runtime by far of the rugged systems here. And, for a tablet meant to be in the field for long stretches, the short battery life is particularly disappointing. The battery is removable, which means you can carry an extra battery or two with you, but you’ll still need to pause what you are doing and power down the tablet to swap batteries.

As for the display, the Durabook R11 outperformed the rest of the lineup on color representation, with more than 10% coverage of the sRGB spectrum over the next highest product. Additionally, the Durabook outranks the rest on Adobe RGB and DCI-P3 coverage. When it comes to brightness, the Durabook remained competitive at both 50% and 100% in terms of nits, but it wasn't a blowout, either.

While the Durabook excels in color representation and display brightness, it seriously lags on battery life. Without the ability to hot-swap batteries, this could become a problem while in the field for extended periods of time.

Verdict: Ready for the Field, But Lacking Lasting Power

The Durabook R11 stands out among fully rugged tablets for its modern 12th Gen Intel silicon and thin-and-light (but, yes, still fully rugged) design. It’s the thinnest and lightest fully rugged tablet we’ve reviewed, which is of paramount importance for a machine you or your employees may be toting around in the field or warehouse during long workdays. Holding a heavy tablet hour after hour—and day after day—can become a physical strain on workers.

Unfortunately, the R11's disappointing battery life prevents an Editors' Choice award. Even though they are bulkier, we still recommend the Getac F110 or Panasonic Toughbook G2 for their longer runtimes, which is definitely a more important metric.