Caterpillar CAT CS61-DAB-ROW-KN 64 GB S61 Thermal Android UK SIM-Free Smartphone - Black

A phone with plenty of features, Like FLIR, air quality for VOC's with alarmed warnings, after switching from an iPhone to my first Android, very happy with my choice, The phone is most definitely built well. Still learning how to use all the features, But so far very happy with the battery life, Camera quality is pretty amazing as well, Purchased after watching a Big Clive youtube video on it, and if its good enough for him, then surely good enough for the rest of us. Not tried the laser measurements yet, but this may be its one weak point, But will update if i find different. Although already have quite an accurate bosch one.

I purchased this phone upon release and had high hopes. The first phone I received had the majority of the faults listed below and an odd screen flash that made the screen illuminate to full brightness for a moment before returning to normal. This was returned and I received another. It was worse than the first and had all of the faults below, meaning both phones suffered with very similar issues (the second one didn't have the odd screen brightness issue).The most irritating fault was the disappearing answer button when I received a call. Just removing the phone from a pocket and brushing past the screen was enough to send it to the lock screen. I then had to unlock the phone. The phone would continue to ring but would only display that standard home screen with no clue of how to answer the call. It meant going in to the call app to find the answer button by which time, the call had often ended. As a phone, its primary feature must be to make and receive calls? Apparently not.If youplan on using the phone for tethering with another device, be aware that CAT are aware of the issue with this and have been since I and others raised it when it was released. I'm still waiting for them to come back to me with a fix but for now, they only have a temporary solution which requires you change some APN settings and essentially lose your data connection on your phone. So, you either have data tethering of data on your phone. You can't use both at once, at least for now. If you were watching a film on a tablet you were tethered to, you wouldn't be able to receive any messages via Whatsapp or emails, for example, on your phone until you went back in to your network settings and restored them to default. But as a result, you would no longer be able to tether on the tablet. On top of that, these were the other common issues I had on both phones:Temperature Sensor – this just doesn’t work and claims to be far higher than the actual real temperature. It is normally around 10’C above the real temp.Proximity Sensor – when answering a call, the screen should become unresponsive beside your head but instead, the phone continues to operate and your ear gets to select a number of options mid-call, without your knowledge. It is quite easy to end a call, switch off data, alter ringing volume without knowledge whilst chatting to someone. A 3rd party app to reset the proximity sensor only temporarily works to fix the issue.Google Pay – the NFC connection on the phone is so poor (probably due to the hardened, built in shell) that it struggles with NFC tags and does not work with Google Pay. Caterpillar are aware but still haven’t resolved the issue.Regular App Crashes – apps on the phone often crash or freeze (online banking etc) yet work fine on my 3-year-old device.Bluetooth – the connection is temperamental and often doesn’t connect for an extended period of time, then does. This is across multiple devices (mainly vehicles) even though other phones connect without issue.Whilst I like the look and durability of the phone, these issues made it difficult to use and at this price, it is simply not worth the hassle.

This phone is really slow compared to other devices at this price. Is a good phone but the price you pay is only for some extras.

I bought this after cracking the screen on yet another Samsung phone and the one thing I cant knock this phone for so far is its dropability as I have dropped it literally dozens of times albeit not from great heights but so far its just bounced and shrugged it offAlthough to be fair it is also in a wrap around leather folio/deskstand case which has a rubber bumper to hold it in place inside the leather. But so were all the samsungs whose screens I cracked.Battery life so far has been quite impressive, I'm not a heavy phone user, but I have still had 50% capacity left after almost 2 days when I have forgotten to charge overnight. If I wasnt so forgetful I would have probably switched to charging it every other nightAnd LASTLY, yep, sadly theres only three things that I can think of I really like about the phone,,,,,HEADPHONE SOCKET......HUGE THUMBS UP FROM THIS GUY :)Now for the things I havent likedFirstly the phone has "mislaid" its sim card half a dozen times which magically reappears after a rebootAt first I thought it was the card making a bad connection, but because its a total pain in rear end to get the sim card or SD card out I just tried rebooting and that worked everytime sinceThe SD card is even worse pretty much to the point of being a total waste of timeThe phone REGULARLY forgets it has an SD card, but with the SD card when you do reboot it "finds" a "new" SD card and tells you it now needs to be reformatted to work in the phone, this is despite it ALREADY having done that AND the fact the card WAS already working in the phone.After the second time it forced me to delete almost 60gb of data and be faced with the soul destroying task of waiting for it to all copy back onto the card again I just gave up as it was probably the 10th time the card phone had done this which is annoying considering the SD card slot was one of the reasons I purchased the phoneIt also does a similar thing with the network connection, several times I have tried to make a call only to find out it had "forgotten" the network, as with some of the other faults a reboot fixes it.All of those things are MAJOR problems and would seem to suggest an extremely poorly written OS or even dodgy hardware.As they are relatively new to the phone business, and as they almost definitely do not make the phone themselves but get someone else to make it with their name on it we can only hope they do actually bother to fix these rather basic functions relatively quickly through updatesMore minor issuesThe dust caps on the charge and headphone sockets are way too fiddly to open, which considering they dont NEED to be closed to preserve the IP rating and are ONLY there to stop much getting in could have been made to SLIDE into the case with a notch or protuberance to make that easy to do. Instead if the things have closed whilst in my pocket I often have to use a screwdriver to open them as my nails are always really shortHeck, they could even be totally removable if you dont work in mud/dust etcMore minor, its a mildly annoying that the UI is quite basic and 2005 ish to look at and use, even quite basic things like the icons for phone calls and messaging dont even show how many new ones you have.The lack of wireless charging nowadays on a phone this expensive seems dumb, especially as it would be the PERFECT feature to match with a rugged waterproof phone whilst also removing the need to ever open the bottom waterproof cover to begin with Cameras arent very good and have dreadful night time/low light capabilities, even some EXTREMELY cheap handsets have far better cameras, the ones in this phone (excluding the FLIR obviously) feel about 5-7 years out of date to be in a handset, I have been expecting 2012 to send me a text asking for its cameras backHopefully the UI will get some improvements as its just kind of clunky at the moment, with things feeling far more difficult and with more steps than should be needed to so some quite basic tasksAs you would kind of hope this things is built to last, and it certainly seems like it at a first glance then a replaceable battery should also be includedAnd although I dont personally use it, it struck me as quite odd that the charging socket and headphone socket both had covers to protect them in very dirty conditions the air sensor holes which your life COULD actually depend on in some professions doesnt have any type of cover to keep the hole clear so it can actually function when needed. a simple sliding door (as should have been used for the other two) would allow easy covering of the sensor when in mucky conditions and easily opened when the feature is neededSo there ya go for what its worth, my view of the Cat S61 after around 9 months of use so far in the hope it might be useful to somebody or might even be picked up on by the manufacturer as its pretty darn close to being a really exceptionally good product with some minor tweaks and bug fixes rather than just being "alright" to "barely adequate (SD/SIM/Connection issues) right nowMike

Used as part of my job alread dropped it twice and it is robust and reliable. Just as a CAT should be.However.Almost 2 years old now, I just bought the newer S62. The S61 is a worthy flagship product and still is. The build, spec etc is a world ahead of the newer product.If you've owned a S61 moving to a S62 is a backward step. If a S62 is your first phone, it will be brilliant- and you could upgrade to a S61. Yes, the older phone is better.

Android Pay by Google does not work. I emailed Cat Support in September 2018. On Fri 14 Sep, 09:33 they said,"This was working and has just recently having software issue. This is not with all phones. An update will be released shortly which should resolve your issue. We can only apologise for any inconvenience caused." After two months, Android Pay still isn't working.

Works the same as a Samsung s10 typical android phone it's just on steroids, built like a tank with more features than I have time to go into the underwater camera is pretty cool. I'll never go back to Samsung, Nokia, or Sony I'm sticking with cat from now on.

People are having trouble hearing me when I talk or on the speaker phone verry bad phone quality

Awesome phone!! More helpful then I thought I would be