Bullitt Group has been producing smartphones under Caterpillar Inc's brand (yes, the construction equipment company) for a few years now, giving us phones like the infrared-equipped Cat S60. Now the company has returned with another durable Cat phone, the S62 Pro.
Mountain climbing! Off-road biking! Skiing! Climbing trees! All of these activities are simply too extreme for your current smartphone, or so Cat (nee Caterpillar, the bulldozer people) would have you believe. Their latest Android-powered rugged phone is the S50, announced today at IFA in Berlin and boasting mid-range specs with a body that looks like it's designed to shrug off shrapnel. It's the follow-up to Cat's B15, a phone durable enough to survive an encounter with a front-end loader.
The S50 improves on the predecessor in every way, with a bigger 4.7" Gorilla Glass 3 screen (resolution unknown), a quad-core 1.2Ghz processor, an 8MP rear camera, 8GB of storage plus a MicroSD card slot, an LTE radio, and KitKat from the get-go.
Someone at the Caterpillar equipment company had a lot of fun devising this promotional video for CAT's Android-powered, ruggedized smartphone, the B15. In addition to some dramatic drops using machines right out of a Tonka fantasy, the demonstrators set up a line of 600 smartphones, all powered on and running, then ran over them with a CAT 277D Multi-Terrain Loader weighing over 9,000 pounds. Let's watch!
Naturally the phones come out unscathed, or at least apparently so. That's because the CAT B15 might just be the toughest "rugged" phone yet: this brick of a device covered in thick rubber and plastic is designed specifically to be abused at construction sites, oil rigs, and other hazardous workplaces all over the world.