Caterpillar CAT B15 smartphone offers a taste of rugged Jelly Bean

We've seen our fair share of rugged smartphones, but there's a certain amount of attention due when a heavy equipment builder like Caterpillar gets involved. Its newest smartphone, the CAT B15, undoubtedly has the survivability you'd expect from a company that makes bulldozers: the aluminum-and-rubber shell can survive 5.9-foot drops on to hard concrete, stay immersed in 3.3 feet of water for half an hour and keep working in temperatures between -4F to 122F. Just don't expect top-flight performance elsewhere. While we're big fans of the CAT B15 shipping with Jelly Bean, its 4-inch WVGA screen, dual-core 1GHz Cortex-A9 chip, 512MB of RAM and 5-megapixel camera won't have many of us giving up our faster, more fragile devices. The phone's £299 and €329 European prices (about $437) could still lead to the more accident-prone among us picking up a CAT B15 when it ships in March.

Filed under: Cellphones, Mobile

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Source: T3