Ina Fried

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Caterpillar Aims to Make Splash With Rugged, Waterproof Android Phone

Caterpillar is best known for making heavy equipment, but the machinery brand thinks it can add something to the phone business.

Cat has partnered with Bullitt Mobile, a British electronics firm that builds products using well-known brands to develop a rugged, waterproof Android phone.

The easiest way to make phones rugged is to just wrap them in a ton of rubber. But that also makes them big and bulky — something Floyd said his group was looking to avoid.

“It’s got to be a great phone — something that everybody would feel comfortable carrying,” said Dave Floyd, director of technology for Bullitt.

The result of their work is the Cat B15, a phone that is debuting at the CTIA trade show in Las Vegas and will sell for $349 without subsidies. The device packs a 4-inch screen, a dual-core MediaTek processor and the Jelly Bean version of Android into a device capable of surviving a 6 foot drop onto concrete and withstanding up to 30 minutes in 3 feet of water.

Its screen is also designed to work with a wet finger — something that trips up most smartphones. And all that in a phone that weighs just under six ounces.

Bullitt isn’t talking carriers yet, but it’s a GSM phone with support for HSPA+ networks, so either AT&T or T-Mobile USA would be a good fit.

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I think the NSA has a job to do and we need the NSA. But as (physicist) Robert Oppenheimer said, “When you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it and argue about what to do about it only after you’ve had your technical success. That is the way it was with the atomic bomb.”

— Phil Zimmerman, PGP inventor and Silent Circle co-founder, in an interview with Om Malik