Saudi Aramco runs the Kingdom's upstream, gas and most of its refining, from the Ghawar wellheads to the berths at Ras Tanura. This page is for the operations, HSE and telecoms teams who decide what an explosion proof mobile phone has to be before it is carried onto an Aramco site in Saudi Arabia, and it sets out what the IS-04Z1 is being designed and documented to meet. The IS-04Z1 is designed around intrinsic safety rather than a flameproof enclosure.
Launching Q4 2026 · certification and vendor documentation in progress
Aramco's classified areas are spread across the whole country rather than gathered in one plant. Ghawar, worked from areas such as Ain Dar, Shedgum, Uthmaniyah, Hawiyah and Haradh, is served by gas-oil separation plants, and crude is stabilised at Abqaiq before it moves on to Ras Tanura and, through the East-West pipeline, to Yanbu. Shaybah in the Empty Quarter and Khurais are fields in their own right, with their own processing. Gas plants such as Hawiyah, Haradh, Uthmaniyah and Fadhili feed the gas grid and the NGL streams. Most of this is hydrocarbon gas, with sour service at the older processing plants and hydrogen in the refinery hydrotreaters, so the useful question for a handset is which gas group and temperature class the area drawing says, and whether the scope is written in zones or in the American class and division system.
Whether a device may enter a classified area is decided by its certificate. How long it lasts, and whether anyone trusts it on a night round, is decided by the conditions below. These are the points an Aramco operations supervisor would raise first.
A gas-oil separation plant round or a pipeline patrol can run for hours inside the classified boundary. The 4,000 mAh battery is specified to cover a working shift, so the handset does not have to leave the area partway through to find a charging point.
Shaybah and the offshore platforms are not places where a failed phone is replaced in an hour. IP68 sealing and rugged build are specified with a long supply chain in mind, and an enrolled spare can be issued and wiped from the same console.
A shamal brings fine dust into every port, and summer surface temperatures leave metal too hot to hold. The marking target is II 2 G Ex ib IIC T4, and the temperature class is the first line an instrumentation engineer will check against the area classification.
Operators control cameras tightly on their sites. A camera that your own console can disable by area or by group is more workable than a device without one, because the same handset can then serve a records round where photographs are allowed.
Android 16 carries Arabic and English, so a national operator and a visiting maintenance crew can be issued the same configuration. Android Enterprise profiles separate the operator's applications from anything a contractor adds.
An operator walking a separation train records pressures and levels, photographs a leaking flange and calls the control room, all inside the boundary. One handset takes the place of the radio, the camera and the round sheet that is signed out at the start of the shift.
A planned shutdown multiplies the contractor population and the permit traffic with it. An enrolled handset carries the permit application, the site directory and the daily progress report, and can be locked to the applications the operator has approved for the duration.
Inspection crews cover long distances between valve stations with little to navigate by. Four-constellation GNSS puts a coordinate on each finding and the 50 MP camera records the defect against it.
Both systems are in use in the industry, and which one a given Aramco scope uses is something to confirm with the project engineer rather than assume. The IS-04Z1 is designed for Zone 1 and Zone 21, with NEC 500 Class I Division 1 being pursued alongside, so the answer shapes which certificate you ask for.
In-Kingdom Total Value Add is Aramco's programme for scoring local content in supply. It tends to favour suppliers with a Saudi presence, which is why a Saudi-registered partner is expected to hold the supply side. Ask the procurement team how it is applied to a handset order of your size.
That is a question for the site's HSE and telecoms teams, and it usually turns on the certificate, the marking and the MDM policy. A personal phone is not acceptable in a classified area. An enrolled, certified unit issued for the job is a different matter, once such a unit exists.
No. It is pre-launch, with IECEx, ATEX, NEC 500 and SASO work still in progress for a Q4 2026 launch. Evaluation units are intended for safe-area handling and MDM trials first; classified-area use waits for the certificate.
Tell us the site, the zone and gas group, and roughly how many handsets. The SAMS team replies by email with the datasheet and the certification schedule for Saudi Arabia. The IS-04Z1 is pre-launch and certification is in progress, so there is no list price yet; indicative pricing is issued in writing against a stated quantity and site.
Tell us the zone, gas group and operator. We will send the datasheet and the certification schedule for your market.
