REVIEW: CAT B15 Smartphone

Who doesn't know this: while visiting the regular pub, the smartphone suddenly ends up in the beer glass and is thus broken. It happens quite frequently. CAT offers a solution for this, the B15 smartphone, so to speak the tough phone among smartphones. We tested it for you and will tell you what it can do.

Yes, you see correctly in the main image, the phone is in a cup full of water and it doesn't care. At least not for 30 minutes thanks to the IP67 certification. Furthermore, it is also surprisingly shockproof and falls from up to 1.80m do little harm to the phone. However, it is not indestructible.

An entire list of technical specifications would be a bit too much here, so we link to the manufacturer's page. The phone with its dimensions of 123 x 56 x 17.5 mm is not thin and at 136g not particularly light, but it is robust. Unfortunately, we did not achieve the battery life of 26 days, but we also had some app running constantly. Thus, we came to a typical smartphone runtime of 24 to 48 hours.

Because of the apps. The phone is equipped with Android 4.1 (Jelly Bean), so a nearly unmanageable number of different apps is available. For testing purposes, we naturally installed some and had no problems with them.

The most important thing for smartphones is probably the screen. The CAT B15 comes with a 4" touchscreen that works smoothly even with wet fingers. The maximum resolution is 480 x 800 pixels, so not Full HD, but still all icons are displayed sharp.

Here you can see the 2000 mAh LIon battery and the cover nicely. The cover is simply clicked on and locked with the slider on the underside. Unfortunately, in case of too high or too forceful falls, the cover sometimes comes off, and waterproofness is then no longer guaranteed.

CONCLUSION: A rugged smartphone! Waterproof, shockproof, and modifiable for any demand with Jelly Bean through apps. The battery life is like with other smartphones. This unfortunately diminishes the outdoor suitability of this mobile phone. For all those who don't want to worry too much about taking care of their phone, we can only recommend it.

The CAT B15 Smartphone (10.1 cm (4 inch) touchscreen, 5 megapixel camera, Dual Core 1 GHz Cortex A9, Android 4.1) silveris available at Amazon for 280€ excl. shipping