Getac F110 (2022) Review | PCMag

Forget the old Timex watch that “takes a licking and keeps on ticking”—how about a versatile Windows tablet that keeps on running, despite a drubbing? That would be an appropriate motto for the sixth-generation Getac F110, a 2-in-1 rugged laptop with an optional detachable keyboard. (Models start at $2,579; our test sample is $4,954.) This is not an everyday approach to tablet computing—the F110 is armored to the gills, with a price to match. Granted, the high price is for a fully loaded system with the keyboard and two high-capacity batteries. But if you’re going for a tablet that can take the kind of abuse the F110 can, you’re going to have to pay for the privilege. It's an excellent alternative to the less expensive but otherwise similar Panasonic Toughbook G2.

Why Buy a Rugged Tablet?

The Getac F110 is a specialized tablet for a specific kind of user. It’s built to take a lot of abuse, though it’s not invulnerable. There are numerous scenarios where a standard tablet or laptop might have its useful life cut short by damage. These include use out in the field by service or utility workers, on a busy shop floor or warehouse, and in dangerous situations first responders such as EMTs, firefighters, and police find themselves in. The military is also a large buyer of ruggedized tablets and laptops.

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(Photo: Molly Flores)

The F110 is touted as being able to take multiple drops onto hard surfaces and withstand up to 95% non-condensing humidity. It's also dust- and water-resistant, with an IP66 rating. That means it can withstand a strong jet of water, which is not uncommon in firefighting or utility work. It does not mean the tablet is waterproof, however: That would require an IP67 rating. 

We did test the F110's rugged capabilities in a somewhat informal and limited manner, not wishing to destroy a review unit by accidently exceeding the ability of the tablet to take abuse. We dropped the unit five times from a height of about 4 feet at random angles onto a wood floor (fortunately it was in a closet, where the dents from our test weren’t overly noticeable), and used the sprayer in our kitchen sink to hose down the F110 for several minutes. In both tests, the F110 came through with flying colors—dent free, lacking water damage, and (after a quick toweling), up and running perfectly.

(Photo: Molly Flores)

In addition to its rugged chops, our test unit is loaded to the gills with optional components. The base F110 model has an 11th Generation “Tiger Lake” Intel Core i5 processor, while ours has a Core i7-1185G7 running at 3GHz with Intel Iris Xe graphics. Base memory on F110 models is 8GB, with 16GB in our test unit and the capability of increasing RAM to a maximum of 32GB. While our review tablet had a 256GB NVMe SSD, you can upgrade that to 1TB. The boot SSDs are contained in a removable module, so it’s a simple matter to upgrade in the field or replace the SSD to store the current one in a safe place. 

Our review unit also sports an optional bar-code reader, a potentially desirable option for use in a warehouse or shop floor. Its stylus has a built-in holder and a strap to keep it from straying too far from the unit when in use.

(Photo: Molly Flores)

On its own, the F110 tablet measures 0.98 by 12.4 by 8.15 inches (HWD) and weighs 3.3 pounds. That compares well with the Panasonic Toughbook G2's measurements (1.1 by 11 by 7.4 inches, 2.9 pounds) when you account for the fact that the F110's 11.6-inch screen is larger than the 10.1-inch display on the Toughbook G2.

As configured with the optional keyboard, our F110 review unit is significantly bulkier, resembling a rugged laptop more than a tablet. The keyboard, as rugged as the tablet itself, provided a comfortable typing experience in testing. Unlike many tablet keyboards, it firmly attaches to the F110 and won’t detach with hard jostling.

The F110 has a bright capacitive-touch panel with a full HD (1,920-by-1,080-pixel) resolution. You can operate it with many types of gloves. (We tested it wearing a pair of nitrile examination gloves.) Its rated maximum brightness of 1,000 nits is very bright for a laptop or tablet. In our testing, the screen recorded a maximum brightness of 1,018 nits, though at 50% brightness it managed only 267 nits. Again, given the extreme circumstances in which the F110 might be deployed, screen brightness is an important consideration.

With the ability to display just 84% of the sRGB color space in our tests, color accuracy is not impressive, but neither is it abnormally low for this class of fully rugged laptops and tablets.

To the right of the screen are two function keys labeled P1 and P2, which are defined in software using a pre-installed Getac utility. Above these keys is the power button, and plus and minus buttons reside below. I needed to use these buttons, and the utility, to adjust the screen brightness, as the function keys on the detachable keyboard don’t provide this capability.

(Photo: Molly Flores)

The F110 is somewhat sparse when it comes to input and output ports, as is fairly common on most tablets and many laptops these days. Besides a headphone/microphone connector and a port for the power supply (both with watertight covers), only two ports are available for attaching a peripheral such as a mouse or docking station. One of these is a USB-A 3.1 Gen 2 port, the other a Thunderbolt 4 port.

(Photo: Molly Flores)

On the plus side, the F110 has excellent wireless communication capability, including the ability for a SIM card to enable cellular service as well as built-in GPS, a necessity in many emergency or in-the-field situations.

Testing the F110: Tough Tablet, On-Target Performance

While Getac bills the F110 as a rugged tablet, it’s configured and performs much more like a laptop than your common iPad or Android tablet. For our performance tests, we compared the F110 with two other rugged Windows-based tablets from Getac, its S410 G4 and K120, as well as two competing rugged laptops: Panasonic’s Toughbook G2 and Toughbook 55 Mk2 (which we tested in 2021). We also added a less rugged Acer Enduro Urban N3 clamshell model in the comparison mix. 

The Getac S410 G4 and Panasonic Toughbook G2 are both Core i5 systems with 16GB of RAM. The S410 has Intel Iris Xe graphics, while the Panasonic has Intel UHD Graphics, the only one of the comparison machines with this particular graphics set.

Productivity and Media Tests

We put the Getac F110 through a stiff battery of benchmark tests to see how it compares with the other rugged tablets and notebooks. The first of these tests is UL's PCMark 10 suite, which simulates a variety of Windows apps to give an overall performance score for office-centric tasks such as word processing, spreadsheet work, web browsing, and videoconferencing. We ran both the main benchmark and PCMark 10's Full System Drive storage subtest, which measures the program load time and throughput of the boot drive (which is almost always a solid-state rather than hard drive nowadays). Both tests yield a numeric score. When looking at the results, the higher numbers are better.

The F110 held its own on both of these tests, though it didn’t top out on any of them. The only test machines that scored higher were the Acer Enduro and Getac’s own K120. Other scores put the F110 pretty much in the middle of a well-performing pack. Similar results were obtained on the Full System Drive storage subtest, with the F110’s score again placing it in the middle of the pack. The Acer Enduro was the poorest performer of the group on this test. The only system that did better on this particular test was Getac’s own K120 tablet.

The next benchmark we ran was HandBrake, an open-source video transcoder for converting multimedia files to different resolutions and formats. We recorded the time it takes, rounded to the nearest minute, to encode a 12-minute 4K video file to a 1080p copy. This is primarily a CPU test, and on this particular test lower times are better. Again, the F110's score was almost twice that of the Acer Enduro's, making it the slowest of the Core i7 machines. The Core i5 systems, as expected, had the worst scores of the bunch. 

Another test of CPU performance is Maxon’s Cinebench R23, which uses the company's Cinema 4D engine to render a complex scene. We use the multi-core benchmark that fully exercises all of a processor's cores and threads. As with PCMark, higher numbers are better. On this test, the Getac F110 was the star of the group, with another Getac system, the K120, right behind it. The Panasonic Toughbook G2 and Getac S410 G4, both Core i5 systems, scored at the bottom of the group, which is not surprising considering this is a CPU test. The F110 and the Panasonic Toughbook 55 Mk2 both run at a 3GHz clock speed with identical CPUs, and their scores on this particular test were very close. 

Primate Labs' Geekbench is yet another benchmark that runs a series of CPU workloads designed to simulate real-world applications ranging from PDF rendering and speech recognition to machine learning. We recorded its multi-core score; a higher score is better. As would be expected from the other CPU-intensive benchmarks, the Getac F110 did fairly well, in the middle of the pack, though the differential between highest and lowest scores was not great.

Finally, Puget Systems' PugetBench for Photoshop uses Adobe's popular image editor to measure performance for content creation and multimedia applications. It executes a broad range of general and GPU-accelerated Photoshop tasks ranging from opening, resizing, rotating, and saving an image to applying masks, gradient fills, and filters including Lens Correction, Smart Sharpen, Field Blur, and Tilt-Shift Blur. Again, as with many of the benchmarks we use, higher numbers are better. The F110 isn’t really targeted towards multimedia creation, and its benchmark score landed it again in the middle of the group, while the K120 had the highest score in the comparison.

Graphics Tests

The Getac F110 cannot really be considered a graphics machine in the same sense that many desktops and laptops can be, though there might be scenarios, such as having to watch a video demonstration or how-to, where video capability becomes an important factor. Still, we ran our suite of graphics benchmarks, and overall we were satisfied with the results that the F110 turned in.

The first graphics benchmark test we run is UL's 3DMark, a test suite for Windows that contains a number of options for evaluating different GPU functions and software APIs. We run two DirectX 12 tests on all PCs: Night Raid, which is appropriate for systems with integrated graphics like the F110’s, and Time Spy, which is more demanding and most suitable for systems with the latest dedicated GPUs. On both of these tests, the Acer Enduro rugged laptop was on the top of the pack, with the F110 in the middle.

Our other gaming-oriented test, GFXBench, is a cross-platform CPU performance benchmark that stress-tests both low-level routines like texturing and high-level-game-like image rendering.  We run two tests, both rendered off-screen to accommodate different display resolutions. Both Aztec Ruins (1440p) and Car Chase (1080p) exercise graphics and compute shaders, but the former relies on the OpenGL application programming interface (API) while the latter uses hardware tessellation. We recorded the results in frames per second (fps) with higher numbers being better. As with several of the other graphics-oriented benchmarks, the Acer Enduro laptop turned in the highest score of the group, with the F110 again in the middle of the pack. 

Again, it should be noted that Getac does not market or target the F110 as a graphics-oriented device. If the particular applications you need to run require fast-responding graphics capability, the F110 may not be your best choice, though the other two Getac rugged tablets in this comparative group did turn in scores competitive with several of the laptops.

Battery Rundown Test

PCMag tests battery life by playing a locally stored 720p video file with screen brightness set at 50% and audio volume at 100% until the system quits. With this test, Wi-Fi is placed in airplane mode and keyboard backlighting (if available, which the F110 does not offer) is turned off during the test.

The Getac F110 excelled in this benchmark, largely because our review unit has two optional high-capacity batteries in place of the standard ones. This is a particularly important capability for a tablet that will be used in critical applications. The F110 was near the top of the group, with an impressive time of 14 hours and 2 minutes. The only member of the comparative group that bested this time was the Panasonic Toughbook G2, which ran for an incredible 21 hours and 37 minutes. At the bottom of the list was Getac’s K120 tablet.

More Laptop Than Tablet

Overall, the F110 G6 lives up to its “fully rugged” tagline, and while it works well as a Windows tablet, it also works equally well as a rugged laptop with the addition of the optional keyboard. While it wasn’t the top scorer on many of our benchmark tests, it did hold its own, and overall, it provided very good performance. 

It’s important to keep in mind that Getac doesn’t market this tablet as a performance or graphics powerhouse, but rather as a very useable and useful Windows-based tablet meant to take an enormous amount of abuse and still work. The F110 fulfills this mission admirably.

(Photo: Molly Flores)

Overall, Getac succeeds in offering a specialized tablet for use in harsh environments and where impact or water damage is a real possibility. It is expensive, but not overly so considering its intended market or other options such as ruggedized laptops or other rugged tablets. If your need is for a convertible laptop with superior survival capabilities, the Getac F110 is a worthy consideration alongside the Panasonic Toughbook G2.