Cat S60 rugged smartphone features with integrated thermal camera

Once strictly an extremely expensive tool used only by law enforcement and the military, thermal cameras are now accessible to anyone with a smartphone and a $250 accessory.

But, in the image of its famed rugged equipment, the brand’s newest smartphone is built to withstand a beating – and it has thermal imaging sensors built into it. “If you look back at the Samsung Galaxy S6 and Edge, it’s a hell of a product but in terms of innovation we are taking incremental steps”, Pete Cunningham, senior product manager at Bullitt, told CNBC at an interview. Dubbed as Cat S60, this device comes with the waterproof feature, which goes up to 5 meters in-depth under water for one hour.

“The Cat S60 presents mobile users around the world with new capabilities – a ‘sixth sense” experience that only thermal imaging can offer, ‘ said Andy Teich, President and CEO of FLIR. Its versatile, super-bright display can be viewed in bright sunlight, and the touchscreen can be controlled with wet fingers or while wearing gloves.

According to Caterpillar, the S60 is the first phone to contain an integrated thermal camera, using an embedded heat visualization device made by FLIR.

The Cat S60 will be priced around $600 when it launches at the end of May. Examples of how this could be used include spotting moisture, detecting heat loss from windows and doors, indicating electrical appliances that are overheating, and seeing in complete darkness.

It supports location tracking using GPS, assisted-GPS, Glonass, and even the Chinese Beidou satellite network.

The front camera maxes out at five megapixels, while the rear camera manages 13. All that jazz runs on Android Marshmallow, and is backed by a hefty 3800 mAh battery, which at this screen resolution should have the phone going for a while.

Cat will unveil the Cat S60 to the public at the Mobile World Congress scheduled to be held at Barcelona from February 22nd.

The phone will be available in June for $599. While most of us might find the phone to be weird in shape and expensive, we need to understand that it is meant to for a certain niche of buyers for whom the only features that would matter the most will be the ruggedness of the phone.