World's Toughest Phones' Heading to U.S.

Their European phones have been dropped from a 13-story building and shot with guns, four times, but Sonim's ultra-rugged GSM cell phones keep on ringing. Now, the California-based company finally plans to bring their phones home to the US with the upcoming XP3, which will be available next March from several rural U.S. carriers. Designed for blue-collar workers and wilderness aficionados, the Sonim XP3 is as close to indestructible as a phone gets. It's waterproof. Officially, it runs at temperatures from -4 to 140 degrees Fahrenheit and it withstands a 6-foot drop onto concrete without shrugging. Sonim's chief executive, Bob Plaschke, said it can actually run at temperatures down to -40 degrees and survive a 9-foot drop (not to mention that one, 13-story fall.) It's impervious to almost anything, including "micro-particles." It has 2.5 days of talk time and an astounding 2 months of standby on its huge 2200 mAh battery. The U.S. version will be a quad-band EDGE, GSM phone with GPS, Bluetooth, and a flashlight mode. It has a glare-resistant 128x160, 65k-color screen. It isn't a smart phone, but it runs Opera Mini for Web browsing out in the wilderness. It will have a 3-megapixel camera with geotagging for still photos, but no video capability. It doesn't play music, but the speakerphone goes really loud without distortion. It's protected by a 3-year, no-questions-asked guarantee. You break it, you get a new one. There will be a European version of the XP3 with fewer features, as well. "There's two percent of the market that will really want these phones, and they'll find us," Plaschke said. There are other rugged phones on the US market, but none are this tough. The toughest I've encountered are the Nextel i365 and i580, but they aren't waterproof, just water-resistant. The Verizon G'zOne line is waterproof, but not quite as rugged. The Kyocera KX12, for Alltel, and the new Samsung Rugby, for AT&T, are also rugged, but not as hardened as the Sonim beasts. Of course, many of those phones also have consumer-friendly media features that the XP3 lacks. Sonim may be a US firm, but so far they've stayed out of the US market, except for the occasional gray-market import of their existing XP1 phone. The reason is familiar: the U.S. market is "a monopoly ... okay, an oligopoly," Plaschke said, where if you're a GSM phone maker, two people (the buyers for AT&T and T-Mobile) control almost all the GSM phone sales in the country.