The MC3400 is the MC3400 wherever it comes from. Same Zebra warranty, same device, same carton. What differs is whether anybody helped you pick the right one, and whether it works the day it arrives.
So this page is not a specification sheet. Zebra publish one and it is better than ours would be. This is the part nobody writes down: which keypad your system actually wants, and what happens to a device between the carton and the shelf.
This is the choice that matters most and gets the least thought. The device is the same underneath all three — but an operator presses these keys a few hundred times a shift for the next five years.
Numeric only. It is the right answer more often than people expect, because in a properly labelled warehouse the bin is scanned and the part number is scanned. The only thing a hand ever types is how many.
Fewer keys, bigger keys, less to get wrong with a glove on. If your counts are the work, this is the one.
Running Pronto, this is the one we would supply. Pronto's function keys sit along the bottom row here, one press away. On the 47-key you press FUNC and then a number — two presses instead of one, on every transaction, all day, by every operator.
No data sheet tells you that. Order the wrong one across forty devices and you have bought a permanent tax on every scan.
A full alphabet. Necessary if your process needs free text — a note on a damaged carton, a name, a reference that is not on any label. The trade is smaller keys and function keys moved behind a modifier.
Worth having when it is genuinely needed, and worth avoiding when it is not.
The scan engine. It is the only other thing that changes the part number, and it is decided by your racking rather than your budget.
In the hand, on the shelf in front of you, on the carton you are holding. This covers most picking, receiving and despatch, and it is the one most people need.
Much the same reach, but it copes with an operator walking from a dim aisle into a sunlit yard and back. If your work crosses that line all day, this is the one that stops people complaining about the scanner.
The racking answer. It reads a label held in front of you and a label high in the beams without anybody swapping devices or getting on a ladder. If your bin locations go up rather than along, start here.
Long range proper. Very high bay, or across a yard. Fewer sites need it than think they do, which is worth finding out before you pay for it.
There are more than thirty versions of this device. Three keypads, four scan engines, and options on top. We show three — one per keypad, in the configuration we would quote unless you told us otherwise. The rest exist and we will happily work out which one you want. That is a phone call, not a table.
We do not quote the camera versions. Zebra now build these with front and rear cameras, tied to augmented reality and AI — reading handwriting off a photograph, recognising an address in a picture and blurring it out. Genuinely clever, and it will matter. It does not matter yet in an Australian warehouse, and it adds cost to every unit. Most people do not know the option exists, and on a phone they would know what it was for — on one of these, ask yourself what for. If you want one we will get it. We just will not put it on a quote you did not ask for.
The honest way to settle this is not on a website. It is to put all three on a bench in your warehouse and let the person who will use one for eight hours hold each of them. That takes about ten minutes. Deciding any other way takes about three months and the answer arrives after the invoice. We will bring them out.
We have customers on each, buying the same device in the same month. We do not charge differently for the second one and we do not push anybody towards it.
Some customers have their own IT team, their own device management, and a build they apply themselves. They do not need us in the middle of it and it would only slow them down.
So we ship the cartons and stay out of the way. That is a perfectly good arrangement and one of our customers works exactly like that, happily.
Everything below happens at our bench before anything leaves. Batteries in, charged, configured, tested, repacked. The device arrives ready to work rather than ready to be set up.
For anyone without an IT team to hand — or with one that has better things to do than forty first-boot wizards — this is the difference between a rollout and a fortnight.
It is not an impressive list. That is rather the point — it is a job sheet, and the value is that somebody does all of it before the device reaches a person who is trying to do their own work.
That last one is the whole reason to turn up. It worked in our office. Our office is not a warehouse with racking in it, steel everywhere and an access point somebody mounted in 2019. It has to work there.
The wrist straps are not on an invoice. Neither is labelling the power supplies. They are small things that stop a device being dropped and stop a charger disappearing into another department, and arguing about them would cost more than they do.
The 29, the 38 and the 47 on a bench, held by the people who will use them. That argument settles in about ten minutes this way.
We bring a large magnetic label. Somebody goes up in the caged pallet or the picker and puts it on a beam. Then we scan it from the floor. Whether a device reads a label six metres up is not a specification anybody should take on trust — and the magnet means nothing is stuck to your racking afterwards.
What is on your racking now, whether it is the right material, whether a bin location is readable from where a picker actually stands. That part is free, and it is usually where the money is.
Sydney metro, the Central Coast and Wollongong — that is a drive and we will do it. Further if the job warrants it; we have flown to Melbourne and Perth once each. For anywhere that far these days we would rather start on a video call than put an airfare into your quote — you walk us round the racking on a phone, we show you the three keypads and answer the questions. If it still needs a visit after that, we will get on a plane.
We quote this one rather than list a price — the configuration, the quantity and what you need staged all move the number, and a figure on a page that is wrong for you is worse than no figure.
Mounting is the part nobody asks about until afterwards. A holster on a forklift mast, a bracket at the end of a bench, a cradle on a pallet jack. We import them as they are needed — tell us where the device has to live and we will find the bracket for it.
Same shape, same job, same gun grip. If you are running MC3190s that still work, nothing here is urgent — but the batteries get harder to buy every year. What replaces what, and what the move actually costs.
And your MC3300 cradles and batteries still fit. Coming off MC3300s, the chargers and the batteries carry over. That is not a small saving when a four-slot cradle costs what it costs, and it is the sort of thing nobody mentions until you ask.
If your software vendor also sells hardware, you may have heard that. Software support, the manufacturer's warranty and the staging in between are three different responsibilities. How they actually divide up, and the one question worth putting in writing.
Which system, how many, and what the operators actually type. That is enough for us to tell you which keypad and what it will cost — and whether it is worth us driving out with all three.
