Hot on the heels of the Sonim Sentinel rugged mobile phone with lone-worker safety capabilities, comes another mobile with similar capabilities from rival US firm Durrocomm.

The Durrocomm Ventura was announced back in April, but sales are due to start at the end of August/beginning of September. The sole UK agent is Northamptonshire-based Global Communications, which will be selling it directly as well as setting up dealers around the UK.

How tough is it? Durrocomm says the Ventura can be dropped from a 2m height, crushed under a 300kg weight and is water resistant to the IP67 standard.

It has some unusual features, too, including the ability to accept two SIM cards at the same time. That means if you have patchy coverage on any one network on the farm, you could use SIM cards from two different networks and pick the best one according to where you are.

Rugged phones (including Durrocomm’s existing LM801) have tended to have fairly basic operating systems, with few of the bells and whistles that come as standard even on relatively cheap “ordinary” mobiles.

However, Durrocomm claims the Ventura’s software is on a par with many business phones. Facilities look to be pretty good, too, with touchscreen operation, Bluetooth, a 2 megapixel camera, WAP and MP3 and MPEG4 music/video players.

It also has GPS to run satnav software, says the firm, as well as the capability to operate lone-worker software from Sitex Orbis. This includes an emergency button that puts you straight through to a monitoring centre and sends your exact GPS position as well.

The handset alone will cost £254 and monthly packages are available from Global Communications.