BARCELONA—The Cat S60 was announced shortly before Mobile World Congress and made waves because it was the first smartphone to include a thermal imaging camera. That's on top of its ultra-rugged build and relatively good 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 first responders.
The S60 is built along the same lines of the Cat S40. There's a thick metal frame, a rubberized back, lots of hardened polycarbonate, and various flaps to keep the device from losing its waterproofing capabilities. It actually feels surprisingly light, relative to its somewhat chunky dimensions. The beefy build lets it have features like waterproofing, drop proofing, and military spec 810G.
The key selling point, of course, is the Flir thermal imaging camera. The phone has two lenses on the back; the one bounded by a yellow ring is the thermal camera, and the other is the regular 13-megapixel rear facing sensor (there's a 5-megapixel front-facing camera as well). Both are rather slow to launch, but the thermal-imaging camera certainly takes longer to get going. The rep at the booth did advise me that the device is still a prototype and some aspects of it may be buggy.
That said, the thermal camera did work and quite well from the looks of it. Once it launched, it showed a heat map, the heat in my hand, 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 measure surface temperature a distance of 50 to 100 feet away, through smoke or other things that may block your view.
The 4.7-inch 1,280-by-720 display is very bright and looks fairly sharp. It's usable if you're wearing thick gloves or if your fingers are wet. It's 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 as durable, if not more.
Under the hood, the S60 has hardware that puts it on par with a midrange phone like the HTC One A9. It has a Snapdragon 617 processor, 3GB of RAM, and a large 3,800mAh battery that's been optimized for better performance. The device comes with 32GB of internal storage and can take microSD cards. It seemed fairly fast when swiping through screens and switching between apps. There don't seem to be a lot of changes to the version of Android 6.0 Marshmallow that it is running and that was true of the Cat S40 as well.
The phone has 4G LTE connectivity, high-quality audio, and will come unlocked for use on GSM carriers like AT&T and T-Mobile. The device will start at $599, with a release later this year. Stay tuned for our full review.
This article originally appeared on PCMag.com.