Smartphones are entirely impractical on a construction site. After all, what hope does your smartphone on a job site when it can barely survive day-to-day life without a case? For those of us who want a smartphone, but also need it to survive life outdoors, it has to be ruggedized and nearly indestructible. While several companies have tried in the past, there hasn’t been that one really amazing phone that I would recommend. Caterpillar, who is the name in heavy duty construction equipment, has entered the smartphone arena with the B10 rugged smartphone.
Built with the job site in mind
When you put the B10 in your hands, you are holding a nearly 1-inch thick rubbery brick. Squeeze it, try to bend it, the phone will offer you nothing in return. Even the 3.2-inch Asahi screen is no slouch, as a competitor to Corning and their Gorilla Glass they are up to the challenge. The face of the phone offers you an answer and hang up button, as well as a bright yellow home button. Each of these buttons are large enough that you can press them with gloves on, and require you to put some pressure in to press the button.
On the top of the phone you have the power button and the headphone jack, with a rubber stopper to help make it water resistant. Additional waterproofing measures include a rubber stopper for the microUSB port, which was recessed so far in that most microUSB cables you find at the store won’t actually reach the port. Along the opposite side of the phone from this port is a dedicated camera button and a dedicated flashlight button. The flashlight button activates the camera flash on the back of the phone any time the phone is powered on.
The 5MP camera on the front and VGA front camera on this phone are nothing to write home to, but they get the job done. Both lenses are protected on either side with rugged impact rubber, making it far less likely that the cameras will break.
The B10 comes with a massive 2000mAh battery, which will power that tiny screen and 800MHz Snapdragon SoC inside for quite awhile. The battery itself is protected by a thick metal door that is screwed into place by two screws. If you’ve got a decent fingernail or a quarter you can get the backplate off in about a minute.
Just above the camera is a notch in the rubber and plastic for a lanyard style hold, which is for the heavy duty wrist cable the phone comes with.
Stock Android with some CAT onboard
The CAT B10 runs stock Android 3.2 right now, but there are some talk about CAT implementing a few software tweaks for the device before it is launched. In lieu of that change, the phone has five different CAT apps installed. Some of them are things like a parts catalog or a helpdesk for CAT equipment. These apps really just re-direct to a mobile website or take you to a very basic list app.
While those apps are still being polished, there’s also a CAT Toolbox app. The Toolbox is filled with apps like rangefinders, levels, and a calculator. It is expected that all of these apps will be on the device when it launches, but right now they are all fairly unpolished.
The CAT B10 also has a range of use-case specific sensors on-board to make the phone even more useful on a job site. The first of which being an NFC chip, which among other things would allow the user to check in to a job site by tapping the phone to an NFC panel at the entryway to the site. The representative from CAT said that NFC is becoming increasingly more useful in this arena, and so put the chip in the phone for this use specifically. There weren’t any apps on board to control the NFC chip, but it is expected that something will be included at launch. On top of this, the phone is equipped with several pressure sensors for safety on the job site. If an unfortunate accident occurs, and a worker is crushed, the phone will respond to the massive increase in pressure and send out an emergency notification to the responsible parties on the job site.
Final Thoughts
In my opinion, none of the rugged smartphones I have seen so far hold a candle to the CAT B10. The phone is amazingly sturdy and highly functional. Aside from placing it right under a jackhammer, I can’t see how someone would break this phone even on a dangerous job site. There’s no official date or price for the CAT B10 aside from “soon, we hope”, but this phone is absolutely work keeping an eye out for if you are in an industry that would benefit from this kind of protection.
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