Hands On With the Cat S60 Thermal Imaging Smartphone

BARCELONA—The Cat S60 was announced soon before Mobile World Congress and made waves because it was the get-go smartphone to include a thermal imaging camera. That's on peak of its ultra-rugged build and relatively proficient hardware. I spent some hands-on time with the device and overall, it seems like a capable device with a big, unique selling point that could be useful for utility workers, construction workers, and start responders.

MWC Bug Art Cat S60 The S60 is built along the same lines of the Cat S40. At that place's a thick metal frame, a rubberized back, lots of hardened polycarbonate, and various flaps to go on the device from losing its waterproofing capabilities. It actually feels surprisingly lite, relative to its somewhat mesomorphic dimensions. The beefy build lets information technology have features like waterproofing, drop proofing, and military spec 810G.

The key selling point, of class, is the Flir thermal imaging camera. The phone has two lenses on the back; the 1 bounded past a yellow ring is the thermal camera, and the other is the regular 13-megapixel rear facing sensor (there'southward a v-megapixel front-facing camera as well). Both are rather slow to launch, simply the thermal-imaging photographic camera certainly takes longer to go going. The rep at the booth did advise me that the device is nonetheless a image and some aspects of it may be buggy.

That said, the thermal camera did piece of work and quite well from the looks of information technology. Once information technology launched, information technology showed a estrus map, the heat in my mitt, and the body heat of the people around me. One issue was that it couldn't work through a layer of plastic (the stand it was sitting on), which seems odd since it's supposed to mensurate surface temperature a altitude of fifty to 100 anxiety away, through smoke or other things that may block your view.

The 4.vii-inch one,280-by-720 display is very bright and looks fairly sharp. It'due south usable if y'all're wearing thick gloves or if your fingers are wet. It'due south covered by Gorilla Glass 4 and should be fairly resistant to scratches or shattering. Our tests of the S40 survived being struck with sharp objects, repeated drops, immersion in water, and being frozen solid. The S60 is supposed to be just equally durable, if not more.

Under the hood, the S60 has hardware that puts information technology on par with a midrange phone like the HTC 1 A9. It has a Snapdragon 617 processor, 3GB of RAM, and a large three,800mAh battery that's been optimized for better functioning. The device comes with 32GB of internal storage and can take microSD cards. Information technology seemed fairly fast when swiping through screens and switching between apps. In that location don't seem to be a lot of changes to the version of Android 6.0 Marshmallow that information technology is running and that was truthful of the Cat S40 too.

The phone has 4G LTE connectivity, loftier-quality audio, and will come unlocked for apply on GSM carriers like AT&T and T-Mobile. The device volition start at $599, with a release after this yr. Stay tuned for our full review.

This commodity originally appeared on PCMag.com.