Gadgetory

we're all a little bit afraid of dropping drowning and breaking our phones so that's why so many of us put big bulky cases on them to protect them some companies actually try to beat us to the bunch and build that rugged ization right into the phone from the get-go but unlike a lot of those phones this new one called the cat s60 has all that rugged ization and a pretty cool trick up its sleeve it's got a thermal camera built right in first let's talk about how seemingly indestructible it is you can drop this thing from up to two meters and you can even submerge it in under five meters of water for up to an hour you can use this thing in pretty extreme temperatures too as cold as negative 13 degrees Fahrenheit and all the way up to 131 degrees Fahrenheit now the good thing is you're not sacrificing a ton of performance for that rugged ization it's got a 3,800 milliamp hour battery which lasts longer than a day three gigs of ram a Snapdragon 617 processor and 32 gigabytes of storage which can be extended with a microSD card one of the only drawbacks is that it only comes with a 4.7 inch 720p screen which doesn't really handle colors that well but you're not buying this phone for the screen if you're going to buy this phone you're buying it for the rugged ization and for the thermal camera now the thermal camera comes from a company called FLIR which provides thermal imaging software and hardware to everything from formula 1 to the military now the camera which is on the back of the phone works just like any other thermal camera it picks up the infrared light that's outside the visible spectrum in any scene and lets you do things like to measure temperatures or even see in the dark now it's VGA resolution so it's not the best but bullet the company that makes the phone and FLIR come up with a pretty clever solution on how to make that better there's also a standard 13 megapixel camera on the back of the phone and they use the resolution from that to add detail to any thermal image that you take what's really cool about that technology is you can use it in real time but what's even better is that every time you capture a photo clear software is capturing all that rich data and so you can always go back to it and do a bunch of different stuff with it you can slide your finger back and forth to see the difference between the thermal image and the regular image or you can drag markers onto the scene and measure the temperature of specific objects now you might be wondering why would I need this technology my phone in the first place and if you're asking that question then this phone probably isn't for you I was asking a lot over the last couple days is I was easy and as fun as it was to take the temperature of my dog or make sure that the cold air from my air conditioner wasn't just going right out my apartment window I didn't really have much use for it and that's because this phone is really for people who need this technology in the workplace so everything from farmers to electricians to people who are doing home remodeling it lets you see things like leaky pipes or a bad electrical job or even let's park ranger spot wild animals who might be near them in the middle of the night and that's part of the reason why this phone is going to be a little on the expensive side when it goes on sale later this summer it's gonna cost about six hundred dollars and it's only gonna work on a chain TMC mobile here's the thing though if you're just curious about playing around with thermal imaging in general or you don't want to give up the phone that you already have we're actually already sells the technology that's inside this phone in another product that attaches to basically all iPhones and androids and while this phone is impressively rugged if you're looking for something that will withstand your daily clumsiness you're probably better off with something like the Samsung Galaxy s7 active which is just about as rugged and has better specs across the board or you can always just get a case never gets old