Mountain climbing! Off-road biking! Skiing! Climbing trees! All of these activities are simply too extreme for your current smartphone, or so Cat (nee Caterpillar, the bulldozer people) would have you believe. Their latest Android-powered rugged phone is the S50, announced today at IFA in Berlin and boasting mid-range specs with a body that looks like it's designed to shrug off shrapnel. It's the follow-up to Cat's B15, a phone durable enough to survive an encounter with a front-end loader.

The S50 improves on the predecessor in every way, with a bigger 4.7" Gorilla Glass 3 screen (resolution unknown), a quad-core 1.2Ghz processor, an 8MP rear camera, 8GB of storage plus a MicroSD card slot, an LTE radio, and KitKat from the get-go. The redesigned phone isn't exactly slim, but it does seem thinner than the previous version (though that may simply be the larger screen) and it includes front-facing speakers and virtual navigation buttons that should work even when the screen is wet. The lack of synthetic sapphire glass is a little disappointing, since Kyocera is already including it in their rugged phones.

Look at those exposed screws! They're like the consumer electronics version of testicles.

In addition to an Ingress Protection rating of 67 and MilSpec 810G for general ruggedness (check out this post to see what that means), Cat is also happy to talk about the S50's Waves-enabled speakers and the proprietary Cat App Store. That's a hand-picked collection of 1000 curated apps... which probably just link out to the Play Store, also included on the phone.

Surprisingly, Cat is more than happy to talk about the price of the S50: it will launch off-contract in forest (green) and slate (grey) versions for $499 in the US and €479 in Europe. A precise launch date was not mentioned.

Source: Cat