Although rowers are not the only ones who are mobile hands-full challenged, the environment that surrounds the rowing community can make owning and using a fancy smart phone just that much more treacherous. In the GLRF booth, we have seen first hand the effects of 3 hours of afternoon sun on our credit card reader, our Nikon CoolPix camera, and our mobile phone. The screens go dark and the electronics become sketchy. Now throw in some Royal Canadian Henley rain and wind blowing everything off the table, some Marina Del Rey beach launch sand, a few minutes calling the coach while your mobile is (securely?) held in a shoulder/head cradle while unloading a boat from the trailer at Oak Ridge, the requisite nudge and fall from the resting position on an erg, or a slide off the dash of the launch boat because Coach Nick’s Miami Beach Rowing Club phone is on ring and vibrate, and and you’ll soon agree that rowers and mobile phones are not meant for a lasting same sex marriage.

So it was by chance that we came upon the perfect rower smart phone. As we prepare to launch a mobile app for the GLRF website, we’re spending a lot of time online looking at mobile phone forums and tech sheets. One banner ad in a forum we visited caught our eye, the Casio GzOne Commando. We clicked the ad and were amazed to read the ‘toughness‘ capabilities of this phone: withstanding 30 minutes submerged under 1 m. of water, operating in a 4″ of rain per hour deluge in Washington DC, 1 hour of vibration riding in the back of Tom Gallagher’s flat bed truck, 24 hours of continuous salt water spray, … well you get the idea.

It’s like the mobile phone engineers rowed for 10 years. Aside from the toughness factor and the hyper masculine look (for those on the DL), here’s a pretty objective review for those who just have to have every Android app out there.

Amazon Wireless, using Verizon, is offering the phone in “CDMA” mode for North America but some of us aren’t at the highest salary levels and it was great to discover the phone can be ‘adapted’ to MetroPCS. What about the rest of the world? We googled the phone under GSM and couldn’t find any reliable links but we’re sure that if enough rowers contact Casio, they will bring out a GSM version.