Snowdon Race 2022 – Putting the TOUGHBOOK 40 to the test in rural Wales

The TOUGHBOOK 40 was built with many features which are designed specifically for the defence market and those working in the world’s most hostile environments: deserts, jungles, mountains. We don’t really have deserts or jungles in the UK (unless you include Jungle Mania Soft Play – I’ve often found it a hostile environment!), of course, but I knew that I wanted to launch this device with an expedition of some kind, so we settled on a trip to Snowdonia National Park. At 3,560 feet, Mount Snowdon felt like a good challenge for the team and the TOUGHBOOK 40 itself, and we gathered a group of 14 employees across sales, engineering, marketing, project management and more for TOUGHBOOK’s Great Race.

Of course, the race was in aid of more than just getting the UK team out of the office. We were humbled to be able to raise money for LATCH, a Welsh Children’s Cancer Charity, as part of the trek. Thanks to the donors, including a few of TOUGHBOOK’s partners, like Channel Edge, Clockwise Marketing, Studio 80, TPP Retail, and Miramar, our Great Race raised over £1,100 for these children and their families.

Once we split the two groups to create a bit of competition, one group was handed the new TOUGHBOOK 40, while the other had the TOUGHBOOK G2, and the Great Race began.  Albeit, not quite as planned.

We dropped the G2 team off at their starting point at 8:40am, and the TOUGHBOOK 40 team continued to the second starting point, 20 minutes away. Both teams were due to set-out at 9am, but after 30 minutes I realised that I had given the driver the wrong postcode - There was little to no phone signal there so, if I’d been smart (which by now you can probably tell I am not) I’d have used the dedicated GPS on the TOUGHBOOK 40, and would have realised we’d gone the wrong way earlier!

As landmarks go, Mount Snowdon is arguably hard to miss, so the day had started with a fairly bad omen for the TOUGHBOOK 40 team.

But once we had finally set off, we got the wind in our sails and managed to summit Snowdon in just under 2.5 hours. Not even a stretch for the TOUGHBOOK 40’s hot-swappable 18-hour single battery life (36 hours with two batteries). We even benefitted from a burst of good karma when we found a woman whose friends had charged ahead, and we welcomed her into our TOUGHBOOK team. I bored her with all the stats on the new device, yet she still called it a “TOUGHBOX” when we parted.