Cat S62 Pro review: Integrated thermal camera shines in this rugged mid-range smartphone Review

While it truly is billed as ‘the best work phone’, it need to be reported that Cat phones’ new flagship Cat S62 Professional is targeted at a subset of the workforce — precisely, staff who need a totally rugged smartphone with a state-of-the-artwork integrated thermal digicam.

Produced beneath licence by Bullitt Group, Cat-branded rugged smartphones consist of the slim, client-helpful S52 (£380) and the economical, business-prepared S42 (£229). The Cat S62 Professional (£599) reviewed in this article succeeds the 2018 S61 (£649), but does not supersede it, as the latter incorporates a pair of characteristics — an indoor air quality sensor and laser-assisted length measurement — that are not obtainable on the new mobile phone. Also, the S61 is obtainable all over the world and supports more 4G LTE frequency bands (fourteen in Europe/RoW, fifteen in the Americas) than the S62 Professional (eleven bands), which is not officially obtainable in the US and Canada.

Design and style

Cat telephones have had some thing of a style makeover not long ago, with much more focus paid out to building them appear much less ‘industrial’ and more mainstream — with out, of study course, compromising on their rugged qualifications, which are main to the brand.

The Cat S62 Professional appears like a typical, if chunky, smartphone with a metal frame, a flat 5.7-inch Gorilla Glass six-safeguarded monitor and a grippy, rubberised back with two digicam lenses in a somewhat protruding lozenge in the major left corner and a centrally positioned fingerprint reader. It measures 76.7mm vast by 158.5mm deep by eleven.9mm thick and weighs 248g. That shaves 1.3mm off the width, 4.5mm off the depth, 1.1mm off the thickness and 2g off the excess weight when compared to the Cat S61, which has a more compact 5.2-inch monitor.

There are sizeable bezels close to the 5.7-inch FHD+ (2160 x 1280) IPS monitor, notably at the major and bottom. This benefits in a monitor-to-system ratio of just sixty nine{36a394957233d72e39ae9c6059652940c987f134ee85c6741bc5f1e7246491e6}, which is effectively adrift of modern minimal-bezel flagships with ratios more than ninety{36a394957233d72e39ae9c6059652940c987f134ee85c6741bc5f1e7246491e6}. The front digicam, ambient light sensor, earpiece and status LED are all in the major bezel. The contact-monitor will work if the user has wet fingers or is donning gloves, while Cat telephones notes that “we can’t assure that all gloves will work with this element”. We had no challenge with the gloves we tried out, together with disposable vinyl ones.

The left aspect properties the metal SIM/SD card tray, beneath a doorway that you prise open up with a fingernail. Our review device could accommodate two SIMs, or one SIM and a MicroSD card, if storage growth trumps the second SIM. Also on the left is a copper-colored programmable key that can hearth up a thrust-to-chat (PTT) app, transform on the flashlight, or launch any other app that’s frequently significant to you.

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The electrical power button is on the proper aspect, textured so it truly is quickly uncovered, along with quantity up/down buttons. The bottom properties a microphone, a USB-C port and a speaker. You will find no three.5mm headset jack — in contrast to the S61, which had one at the major, future to a protrusion housing the thermal digicam.

The Cat S62 Professional feels stable and trustworthy in the hand, and that’s reflected in its rugged qualifications. These consist of IP68/sixty nine certification, this means it truly is ‘dust tight’ and can endure each immersion in drinking water at up to 1.5m depth for 35 minutes and ‘powerful substantial-temperature drinking water jets’. The handset has also been ‘repeatedly’ drop-examined onto a steel floor from 1.8m (6ft) and passes armed service-grade MIL-STD-810H tests, which include thermal shocks, substantial and reduced temperature extremes, tumble and vibration tests, and salt mist situations.

SEE: 5G smartphones: A cheat sheet (cost-free PDF) (TechRepublic)

Cat telephones also notes that the S62 Professional can be continuously submerged and scrubbed with incredibly hot drinking water and soap, which is notably appropriate in the existing overall health/cleanliness disaster.

You will find surely no need to have for a protective scenario with this impressively hardy handset — in contrast to so many mainstream telephones, with their extravagant but often brittle industrial style.

Attributes

The Cat S62 Professional operates on Qualcomm’s mid-array Snapdragon 660 mobile platform, which incorporates an 8-main CPU comprising four speedy 2.2GHz cores and four electrical power-economical 1.8GHz cores, an Adreno 512 GPU and an X12 LTE modem. This is supported by 6GB of RAM and 128GB of interior storage (expandable, as pointed out previously mentioned, by way of MicroSD card) — a important up grade on the S61’s Snapdragon 630, 4GB of RAM and 64GB of interior storage.

As effectively as Europe-centric 4G LTE connectivity, there is certainly dual-band (2.4/5GHz) 802.11ac wi-fi, Bluetooth 5 LE, GPS, NFC and an FM radio. As pointed out before, the indoor air quality sensor and laser-assisted length measuring tool present on the Cat S61 are omitted from the Cat S62 Professional. At some level, it would be great to see Bullitt Group/Cat telephones take care of the trade-offs included so that these valuable sensors can be reinstated in the flagship handset alongside a greatest-in-course thermal imaging digicam.

Conversing of which, the primary attraction with the Cat S62 Professional is its integrated thermal digicam, which uses FLIR’s hottest Lepton three.5 infrared sensor. This has four occasions the number of thermal pixels when compared to the earlier-technology Lepton sensor (160×120 vs . 80×60), ensuing in more compact 12µm pixels and 1440-by-1080 output by way of FLIR’s VividIR image processing technology. The Lepton three.5 can detect warmth sources up to 30m away, and measure temperatures in between -20°C and +400°C in ‘low gain’ mode, or -10°C to 140°C in more exact ‘high gain’ mode (with a typical precision of ± 5°).

It is really enjoyable to present off the integrated thermal digicam to jaded smartphone people, but its primary reason is to serve a vast array of pros — electricians, plumbers, initial-line staff, healthcare specialist, for example — as effectively as Do it yourself fans.

The thermal camera’s in depth operation is accessed by way of a separate MyFLIR Professional app, which has its personal image gallery. You will find a typical Android digicam app much too, of study course, but that only controls the seen-spectrum cameras (12MP at the rear, 8MP at the front). You can select from a array of palettes for the thermal digicam — the default is Iron, but there are 9 choices in full, which display as stay thumbnails when you push the swatch icon at the bottom left of the app workspace.

MyFLIR Professional can present many forms of image: output from the thermal and seen cameras on your own MSX (Multi-Spectral Dynamic Imaging), which overlays linear detail onto the thermal image to provide bigger context and a new Alpha Blending mode, which overlays thermal and seen photos. In each MSX and Alpha Blending modes, sliders permit you to align the thermal and seen photos and vary their relative intensities.

Other valuable characteristics for pros consist of the ability to incorporate notes to thermal photos and generate PDF experiences. You can also area up to 3 movable spot meters and numerous ‘regions of interest’ on photos — either throughout or submit-seize. These ROIs can be entire-frame or movable and scalable rectangles, circles or traces. Isotherms permit you to present a certain temperature array with a spotlight colour you can also set an alarm — a notification, vibrating the mobile phone or capturing an image — when the digicam sees some thing that falls inside the specified array.

It is really easy to ignore the visible cameras — 8MP at the front, 12MP at the back. The latter, with a dual-pixel Sony sensor, substantial 1.4µm pixels and f/1.8 aperture, will take respectable images, even in reduced light.

Android ten was mounted on our review device. You will find no OS overlay, but a reasonable volume of pre-mounted software package, together with the FLIR app and gallery, and Toolbox, which offers a curated collection of apps beneath several headings — Business Resources, Cat Apps, Development, Farming, Outdoors, Rugged Resources.

The Cat S62 Professional supports Android Business characteristics, together with Zero-contact enrolment, and has been examined for enrolment and plan provisioning with main EMM (Business Mobility Administration) methods. It arrives with a two-12 months guarantee and protection updates for 3 decades, and is certain to acquire at minimum one Android up grade (to Android eleven) in its lifetime.

Effectiveness

A Snapdragon 660 chipset with 6GB of RAM is a mid-array Android ten platform, which is accurately what the benchmarks we deployed present. The Cat S62 Professional is a step up from the Snapdragon 630-dependent Cat S61, but won’t be able to compete on efficiency with a flagship-course handset like the Snapdragon 865-dependent OnePlus 8 — especially when it arrives to gaming:

Processor efficiency 
Geekbench 5

Mainstream productivity efficiency 
PCMark for Android (Work 2.)

Gaming efficiency 
3DMark (Sling Shot Extreme)

While the Cat S62 Professional has a more compact battery and a much larger monitor than the S61 (4000mAh/5.7 inches vs . 4500mAh//5.2 inches), it arrives out on major in phrases of battery life. The manufacturer’s declare of 1-2 day’s life appears justified.

Conclusions

Thermal imaging has gone from the maintain of the armed service, to an pricey expert application, to, now, the mass industry. The £599 Cat S62 Professional is not the only smartphone with an integrated thermal digicam, but it truly is arguably the greatest at the moment obtainable. This is however a niche item, nevertheless: it truly is surely enjoyable to use, but not everyone desires integrated thermal imaging on a rugged smartphone, and many would want to invest the same money on sleeker industrial style and more in depth common photography characteristics. That reported, as the price tag and size of thermal digicam modules continue to shrink, we be expecting to see them deployed more broadly in smartphones.

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