Packing a beautiful smartphone with layers after layers of protection seems counter-intuitive in aesthetic point of view and it most definitely defeats the designers’ intention. I don’t know about you, but me think it feels like listening to high-resolution audio files with a muffed earphones or a mono-driver speaker system. Completely pointless. And the same goes to battery life. It is equally pointless to have a device that does it all and not have the battery life to support for all-day use. That is why there’s Cat Phones and that is why now there’s the Cat S41 Smartphone.
Cat came onto the market with smartphones that address survivability in extreme conditions and today, it is back with Cat S41 that is not only built rugged, but also addresses battery life in smartphone once and for all. In addition to withstanding all sort of abuses without the need for extra protections, the S41 comes packed with a crazy high capacity battery of 5,000 mAh. Yes. You heard that right. Five-thousand-freaking-milliampere-hour. To put in perspective, and comparing apple to apple (pun not intended), that’s more than double of what Apple iPhone 7 has to offer.
With a whopping 5,000 mAh, S41 gives you up to 44 days of standby time or 38 hours of throat-drying chatting time over 3G. It has so much battery power in it that it is more than willing to share it with other small gadgets. With S41’s Battery Share feature, your Cat S41 essentially turns into a power bank. Something which is unheard of until today. But this ain’t no ordinary ‘power battery’. It is intelligent too. S41 will cease charging once a user-defined reserved battery level is reached, so you can be sure you still have the desire juice for its own operations.
Cat dived into developing a high-capacity battery in response to feedback from nearly 22,000 CAT phone users. Apart from a pretty much out-of-this-world battery capacity, Cat S41 is, obviously, built with heavy-duty credentials including iP68 rating to prevent dust and water ingress and MIL-SPEC-810G. In other words, it can survive repeated drop on to concrete from 1.8 meters (6 feet), in any orientation, and it can be submerged in up to 2 meters (6.6 feet) for up to an hour and emerged unscathed. And oh, it is well capable of withstanding thermal shocks too. Basically, it is device that you can use with a peace of mind and without cladding it in bulletproof armor.
Other details on the spec-sheet include a wet fingers and gloves-friendly super bright 5-inch FHD display optimized for outdoor use, Corning Gorilla 5 for scratch-resistance, a MediaTek SoC featuring a octacore chip clocking in at 2.3 GHz, 3 GB RAM with 32 GB flash storage which is further expandable up to 2TB via microSD card, a 13MP autofocus with PDAF rear-facing camera with LED flash, a 8MP front-facing camera, underwater mode imaging, latest connectivity like LTE Cat 6, VoLTE and VoWiFi, and finally, it has a Programmable Shortcut Key for use as Push-to-Talk (PTT), SOS, or simply assign it as a quick launch of torch or camera function.
The Cat S41 Ruggedized Android Smartphone is available as of August 31 via Cat website with a $449 sticker. Continue reading for a product video to entice yourself.
Images: Cat/Bullitt Group.
