I was in at Dell yesterday to see its new ATG, a battle-hardened laptop that will compete against Panasonic's ToughBook. Features include an LCD screen that's three times thicker than normal, and covered in a heavy metal lid. Among many outdoorsy features is screen that's 500 NITS, or three times as bright as your average notebook.

A website in Holland drove a car over one of these babies, and Dell NZ is going to try and jack it up for us to do the same, so we'll see. The Keall Mobile is primed and ready to crush.

Dell's ATG doesn't have the motion-sensing technology of some notebooks aimed at rough and tumble industries, or desk jockeys with butter fingers. However, Dell NZ Country Manager Derek Leitch notes that you usually don't drop your notebook straight down (ATG has shock absorbing rubber feet if you do), which would be when motion-sensing tech would be useful for automatically parking the hard drive. At the moment it's more likely to lock your hard drive inadvertently.

Leitch also points out that the ATG has a solid state memory option, where you can go hard drive-less and store everything on Flash memory of up to 32GB. For now, the primary aim is toughness. Unlike a spinning hard disk drive, a Flash chip (like SD) has no moving parts to damage. But Flash memory is also faster and all round more convenient. For now, it loses out in capacity to hard drives (whose mainstream models will reach 1 terabyte shortly, making Flash notebooks today amusingly analogous to the floppy drive-only PCs of yore). But that will change.

Interestingly, Fujitsu has already bought out a notebook in its mainstream Life Book series that's Flash memory only (in 16GB or 32GB "SSD" or solid state hard drive options). So far they're only available in the US, and pretty pricey. But again, that will change. We like change. And things that don't break.