Their 2015 Sony Xperia smartphones, the first ever to be deployed and very tired, will be replaced as they go.
200,000 gendarmes and police officers will gradually be equipped from the fall with the Core X4-Neo, a drop-resistant and shock-resistant Android smartphone developed by the Aix-based company Crosscall.
The number of phones of the Ministry of the Interior, gendarmerie and national police combined, is renewed by a call for tenders… every 4 years, an eternity in the smartphone industry.
"We have fulfilled the specifications of a public tender of 500 pages with material characteristics including resistance and durability and also high software criteria", details David Eberlé, vice-president of the company which has capped to the post 5 competing manufacturers.
Tested in extreme conditions
"We won thanks to a hardened model which does not need an accessory such as a shell to have a certain level of resistance and has one of the best repairability indices on the market", highlights the leader of this SME which already equips, with other models, the controllers of the SNCF or the nursing staff of the AP-HP.
Crosscall has joined forces with the operator Orange, which provides the SIM cards for these devices compatible only with 4G while 5G is deployed throughout the country.
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The law enforcement Core X4-Neo is a device derived from a commercial model - sold from 449 euros - which has undergone and passed drop tests to 2 m on concrete.
It is also able to withstand extreme temperatures from -25 ° C to + 55 ° C and has the IP68 standard, which is total impermeability to dust and most liquids.
Delivered in batches of tens of thousands, this professional device has 4 GB of RAM and 64 GB of internal memory.
A technical sheet sufficient in theory to run the business applications of the gendarmes and police.
The manufacturer provides the terminals with an open-source version of Android 11.
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The experts of the Operator of Classified Interministerial Information Systems (OSIIC) then install a software overlay, the Secdroid operating system.
“It incorporates various security improvements including systematic encryption of flows and stored data,” explains Vincent Strubel, director of OSIIC.
" It was time "
There is no question for state officials to download other applications or install the updates themselves.
The Core X4-Neo will have "a captive application store and a minimization and hardening of the operating system which is suitable for use in a sensitive professional context".
The device should potentially host the secure messaging application Tchap in order in particular to facilitate exchanges between gendarmes and police officers who often use very different software.
These software additions should delay the deployment of devices to field agents by a few weeks.
"This is already a step forward in the digitization of the workforce with the choice of a French manufacturer, it was time to equip ourselves with robust individual solutions", satisfied Dominique Le Dourner, national secretary UNIT SGP Police FO in charge of working conditions.
"But there will be a lack of devices for all field agents, it is already necessary to cover at least 80,000 field police officers and the gendarmes, it was therefore necessary to double the amount in the orders", underlines the union representative who denounces "a gap between the expectations of the police and the public contracts launched by managers unaware of the use of the equipment in the field and of the necessary quality, as had already been the case for the pedestrian cameras made in China which often fell in breakdown ".
The not-so-distant days of Electronic Minutes boxes seem to be over for good.
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