Breathe Easy? Rugged Cat S61 Phone Measures Air Quality

BARCELONA—Rugged phones with extra durability and waterproofing are a must for blue neckband workers, travelers, and anyone who's a tad clumsy.

MWC Bug Art The True cat S61 takes things up a notch. By any measure it's extremely durable, with a reinforced aluminum frame, Mil Spec 810G, IP68 waterproofing, layered Gorilla Glass 5, safety flaps covering everything, and all the other bells and whistles that make it equally resistant to damage equally a tank. That's all groovy and similar to what we've seen on the Cat S60. But what makes the True cat S61 special is its nose.

We speak, of course, of the VOC indoor air quality meter and humidity sensor on the right side of the device. Using a pre-installed app, the sensor tin can measure the general air quality of an indoor surface area with a surprising degree of sensitivity. There are four generalized levels of quality—Excellent Air Quality, Good Air Quality, Moderate Air Quality (the regular air inside the Mobile Globe Congress convention center), Poor Air Quality, and Unhealthy Air Quality.

The of import thing to keep in mind is that these air quality levels aren't necessarily identifying a specific cause of air quality deposition; it could be anything from manus sanitizer spray to carbon monoxide. What they're intended to do is serve as a general monitoring machinery—an air quality Fitbit, if you lot will—allowing yous to keep tabs of the surroundings around you lot. So if you're painting a room in your firm and you encounter the air quality level has spiked to unhealthy, information technology might exist fourth dimension to open up some windows.

Cat S61

That said, sensitivity is surprisingly expert. During the demo, when a small bottle of solvent was opened near it, the phone immediately registered a spike in poor air quality and the orange circumvolve turned to an alarming red. If you give the app permission, it tin also notify you when such spikes occur. While True cat wouldn't recommend using it for something that requires a loftier degree of precision, it serves its purpose equally a general tool.

If the nose isn't enough for you, the Cat S61 comes equipped with an laser-assisted surface area and distance measure. Located on the phone'south back, the laser can measure out the distance of something up to 10 meters away, later on which accuracy degrades. Over again, it's a good tool if you desire to measure something without necessarily needing perfect accuracy. For instance, a realtor trying to get the dimensions of a room or a contractor trying to go the sense of how much material may exist needed to tile a flooring. The light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation dot can also serve as a reference point; salvage a flick and add together measurements later, including altitude and area.

Cat S61

Like the Cat S60, the standout characteristic on the S61 is even so the FLIR thermal image camera. Changes in hardware and software make it more than useful than before, primarily the widening of the range of temperatures it'south capable of measuring. You can now get from -20 degrees Celsius to 400 degrees Celsius, up from the previous top level of 120 degrees Celsius. Image resolution has been sharpened with images and objects more clearly divers, and the app now supports livestreaming to Facebook Alive, potentially assuasive workers out in the field to get aid from colleagues.

Hardware is pretty solid, too. There's a 5.2-inch 1080p display on the front end with actress brightness for outdoor use, gloves style, wet finger mode, and concrete buttons for taking pictures underwater. Under the hood it's powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon 630 processor clocked at two.2GHz with 4GB RAM, 64GB storage, and a miroSD bill of fare slot for more than expansion. All this is powered by a 4,500mAh bombardment uniform with Qualcomm Quick Charge 4.0.

Cat S61

The regular camera consists of a 16MP rear photographic camera capable of 4K video recording and a 5MP front sensor. The phone comes running Android 8.0 Oreo, with a promised update to Android P. Cat of course has a custom UI layer, just it's pretty minimal, largely resembling stock Android aside from the curated apps and widgets. Connectivity protocols include True cat 13 LTE, VoLTE, VoWi-Fi, Bluetooth 5.0, NFC, and dual-band 2.4GHz and 5GHz Wi-Fi. In that location'southward no fingerprint sensor considering information technology's a point of potential breakage and tin can't exist used if yous're wearing gloves or take wet easily.

The Cat S61 is expected to launch in Q2 for 849 euros, which is certainly on the high range, but to be expected given the sensors and tools packed into it. Distance and air quality measurements make it a significant improvement over the S60, only if all you want is a standard rugged phone, more affordable devices will get the chore done, too.