Phone Caterpillar CAT B25 Review: Excavator Relative, Brother Tractors
The American corporation Caterpillar is famous for its bulldozers, excavators, all sorts of construction vehicles, diesel generators and so on. In this case, under the brand Caterpillar produced a lot of other products that have absolutely no relation to special equipment. It is enough to look at a special site and, as they say, imbued with what they saw. Here you will find sunglasses, caps, toys, jackets, and even mobile phone bags. Of course, all these personal belongings are not produced by Caterpillar at all. The corporation sells licenses to use its brand, which is for many a personification of reliability, to third firms that release items with the CAT logo. For example, footwear (by the way, quite good) under this brand since 1994 has been produced by the American company Wolverine World Web.
Not long ago, Caterpillar phones also appeared on the market. There are two actual models: the CAT B25 is the usual push-button “phone”, while the CAT B15 is an Android 4.1 smartphone.
Caterpillar CAT B15
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For some reason, they are not offered on the Shop Caterpillar website: a separate resource, catphones.com, has been created for the mobile direction. Today, both models are sold in Ukraine, and quite officially. Included instructions in Ukrainian, and on the keys of the CAT B25 are Cyrillic characters. True, the above mentioned website has no versions in either Russian or Ukrainian, and the CIS countries do not appear on the Where to Buy page either. In general, they entered the market, but forgot to prepare properly for this very exit. (A number of curious facts speaks about total “forgetfulness,” I will give them a little lower.)
The origin of mobile devices labeled CAT is a separate topic. As it was found out, a company called Bullitt Mobile, founded in 2009 in the UK, is responsible for them. It does not have production capacity, phones are developed and manufactured in Asia. CAT B15 is assembled at the Compal facilities - the one that produces separate products for Nokia (Lumia smartphones, in the past - BookLet 3G netbook), as well as Highscreen Cosmo Android-smartphone. As for the CAT B25, which will be discussed below, it also has Oriental roots.
Nokia BookLet 3G
Highscreen Cosmo
In Russia for sale almost complete analog CAT B25 - teXet TM-510R. The fact that these products are close relatives and are going to the same factory, first of all says design. Take a look at this picture:
Caterpillar CAT B25 and teXet TM-510R
Appearance varies in details, although in general the relationship is obvious. I personally prefer teXet - just because of the bright color. However, with practicality, the TM-510R is also somewhat better: for some reason, a metal socket with a brand logo was attached to the back panel of the CAT B25, with which the paint peels off over time. I still have it whole, but I saw on the Internet photos of the well-known B25, so in their case this panel looks scary.
However, let's do everything in order. Compared to teXet TM-510R, we will return more than once.
CAT B25 comes in a very high-quality, medium-sized box made of yellow cardboard - this is Caterpillar's signature color. (It is a pity that the phone itself was not made yellow.) In the box, besides the phone itself, there are a carabiner with a compass, cable, charger unit and a wired headset. The quality of all these accessories is below the baseboard, the usual "Chinese" in all its glory. But the user manual is translated into Ukrainian quite qualitatively (two more books included, and in each of them - instructions for a couple of foreign languages).
But then everything is much more interesting.
Firstly, the warranty card states that the phone is provided with a one-year warranty. O-h-chen is curious, given the fact that the Cat Phones website is written in large letters about the two-year warranty.
Secondly, on the last page of the same warranty card, it is expressly stated that the Chinese company LeadSky is building the CAT B25. And there it is reported that LeadSky manufactures a similar phone for the company JCB. (Just in case: JCB is a British engineering corporation, one of Caterpillar's competitors.) She also sells her brand to manufacturers of accessories and mobile phones, and a visit to the JCB Phone website immediately revealed the Toughphone Sitemaster 2 , which is almost the complete equivalent of the CAT B25. Well, the JCB Phone brand is being promoted in the mobile market by a company ... Pru-a-Avilno, Bullitt Mobile. Thrifty Britons: CAT was “crushed” by itself, and JCB too.
JCB Toughphone Sitemaster 2
There is in the warranty card and a strange phrase about the presence in the CAT B25 GPS-receiver, which is not in it. (In nature, there are similar in capabilities protected "Chinese" with GPS, but in fact there is little use for this function: you cannot install your navigation application, as the devices do not even support Java, and the navigation built into them is based on Chinese Sunavi Navigation maps. Russia and Ukraine are not represented on them.)
What do you feel when you take CAT B25 in your hand?They can be killed! Well, the feeling of reliability definitely is. In general, the body is made very high quality. The "frame" on the perimeter is made of oak rubber, stylized as special equipment tracks. There are two VERY tight buttons: on the left - to start the camera, on the right - to turn on the LED flashlight (it also acts as a flash for the built-in camera). On the left side is also the standard MicroUSB port, hiding behind a stub of a thick piece of rubber.
Body panels are made of solid gray plastic. The back cover is covered with the same rubber as on the ends, and from the inside it is reinforced with a thick metal plate. It is attached to the body with two metal screws; On the ribbon with the carabiner hangs a small screwdriver for tightening them. In general, everything is serious. I would put the question mark just opposite the metal panel with the logo - I already described the situation with it above. Also note that the mobile phone is very thick (22 mm) and heavy (160 g). The Samsung Galaxy S4 is noticeably lighter, for example.
Comparison with Nokia 105 and HTC Titan
The wrong phone was called a brick (CAT B25 next to Just5 Brick Lebedevsky)
The screen is covered with a protective glass (well, or this is a plastic - the developers do not specify), and the matrix is ​​recessed into the case almost half a centimeter. It looks weird, but the logic of this approach is definitely there: even if the glass hits the stone or even breaks, the screen will not be damaged. In general, it is possible to throw a CAT 25 as you please: I threw the apparatus from the second floor to the ground (not to the asphalt, but to the ground), and nothing, it is very much alive. And yes, the screen (2 inches, 320 x 240) is quite a good one. Here I have a Sony Ericsson W880i, and there the display is clearly worse.
With regard to protection from water and dust, the manufacturer says the compliance with IP67. Six means that the device is fully protected from dust penetration, seven - about the possibility of working under water at a depth of a meter for half an hour without compromising performance. I immersed CAT B25 in the bathroom for an hour, and also in beer for about 15 minutes. The phone passed these tests, there were no problems, although a week had passed.
While diving in a jar of tomatoes ...
... and after him
Although in fairness it should be noted that there are quite a few reviews on the Internet like: “I bought a protected Chinese X, I threw it into the jar with cucumbers for fun and fun, but he took it and died. All goats! Yes, that happens. Therefore, personally, I would not recommend specifically subjecting such Chinese phones to harsh testing - marriage is often found in them. That is, they are guaranteed to work normally in the rain (in general, I repeatedly “clicked” in the pouring rain and regular phones, both touch and button, and this never affected their performance), but it’s obvious to swim in the sea with such mobile phones not worth it. From sin.
Moreover, there is clearly nothing to do with the sea. I am personally interested in underwater photography, but the camera in the CAT B25 ... Well, you understand - a 2-megapixel module without autofocus of the “less expensive class” class cannot afford to rely on miracles. Wonderful and not - here are some pictures taken on CAT B25:
By default, the settings are set to 320 x 240, which is not surprising - the developers expect that the photo-masonry created using CAT B25 will be used only as wallpaper for the desktop.
In general, the market really lacks such a mega-protected mobile phone with a good camera. True, there are virtually no conditions for creating it, since a good camera also needs good hardware - in particular, a powerful processor for processing multi-megapixel images. While most Chinese (including CAT B25) are based on the MediaTek MT6235 chip with a frequency of 208 MHz of the 2006 model. What kind of picture processing is there ... No, of course, some Samsung could make a protected “button” with a cool camera, resources, as they say, allow. But why - where it is better to release the next Galaxy S4 clone with slightly modified TTX.
But back to our sheep. The CAT B25 interface is a standard MediaTek software that comes bundled with the MT6235. The developers didn’t make any changes to it, although there is such an opportunity. For example, in the same teXet TM-510R (I also dealt with it) there are practically no jambs in localization, and this applies to both Russian and Ukrainian. The icons there are also their own, they were painted specifically for this model.
Meanwhile, in CAT B25 the menu is “dubovy”, you can feel the light hand of high-end Chinese designers. And translators, alas, too. With the Russian language everything is fine - there is nothing to complain about, but these are trifles. With Ukrainian everything is much worse. And the matter is not only in incorrectly translated words and capital letters in the menu items arranged in a chaotic order. I personally amused by this moment: to unlock the phone, you need to press the left soft-key, and then the button with the grid. If you set the Russian language in the settings, then after pressing the soft key, the phone will write something like this: “Click on #, and I will unlock”. If you set Ukrainian as the standard one, the phone to unlock will ask you to press "*". You press, but it does not unlock. Because you really need to click on the "#". Trifle? Oh well. I stupid about this for 5 minutes, since CAT B25 was given to me with the Ukrainian language set by default. Here you have the phone "from the manufacturer of world-class technology" ...
In general, the software part of CAT B25 is poor to disgrace. There is a WAP-browser, but I didn’t even start it - and so it’s clear that you don’t take a walk around the web. There is also a client for email, but I very much doubt that he will cope with my tasks. There is one game for which a whole item is highlighted in the main menu, there is an e-book reader, there is a calendar, calculator, currency converter, stopwatch and photo editor. All this seems to work, but ... It is difficult to use. Because it’s all very clumsy, just at the level of sensations. At the same time, Java doesn't support the phone, so Opera Mini is out of the question. If desired, the customer of the phone can fill it with applications - in the same teXet TM-510R there is also the Health program and a unit converter. For some reason, CAT Phones did not bother with this by taking a bare media platform and adding only a couple of pictures with elements of Caterpillar tractors and one “growl of a large diesel engine” ringtone.
With sound, everything is also difficult. The speaker is relatively loud, but the sound is deaf and not very pleasant to the ear. In the settings there are options “Audio effect” and “Enhance low frequencies”, but I would not risk using the CAT B25 as a player - there is no 3.5 mm connector, the complete headset is connected to the microUSB port. The quality of the headset - you know. But the radio "screams" is not bad, and it can work even without connecting a headset.
The CAT Phones website states that the CAT B25 supports microSD cards up to 8 GB. In fact, the device was eating a 32-gigabyte card and did not choke, so there is no problem with that. Another thing is that there is nothing banal to store on a flash drive of such a volume - I have already told you about the status of photos and music.
Working with two SIM-cards is implemented typically - one radio module, leaving the second SIM card offline while talking on the first one and so on. CAT B25 is incompatible with 3G networks (it doesn’t hurt at all). EDGE is also not supported, only GPRS. I would appreciate the quality of the connection on the threefold. Periodically, the connection seems to disappear for a second or one and a half, because of which sometimes individual words or even sentences do not reach the interlocutor (well, or you).
From one charge of the battery CAT B25 I have four days. And this is despite the fact that I only speak it, for other tasks this device is designed poorly. By the way, the battery has a capacity of 1,300 mAh - against 1,500 in teXet TM-510R. In general, the teXet product is inferior to the “Caterpillar” only according to the camera resolution - 1.3 megapixels instead of 2. However, this, you understand, is not critical in this particular case. But the TM-510R has better localization, a more pleasant interface, and the colors are more life-affirming. At the same time CAT B25 is estimated at about 1,200 hryvnia ($ 150, 4,900 rubles), and teXet TM-510R can be bought for $ 650 ($ 80, 2,200 rubles). Perhaps, for someone, the Caterpillar brand will be the most weighty reason for purchasing the CAT B25, but I would not be in a hurry. The factory is the same, the benefits are less ...
There are a lot of protected “Chinese” from different brands on the market now, and if you really need a phone of this type, then you should study the offers more closely. To study - and find among them, for example, the Korean Samsung C3350 for 1,100 hryvnia ($ 135, 4,500 rubles). It is head and shoulders above CAT B25 in terms of the quality of the interface and the level of implementation of functions, although the case is, of course, not as off-road (it also complies with the IP67 standard). If you choose between the C3350 and teXet TM-510R, then it makes sense to dwell on the latter, since the price difference is almost twofold.
Samsung C3350
Summing up, I’m quoting a review left by an unknown visitor on the CAT B25 page in one of the online stores: “Excavators at Caterpillar are great, but the phones are [CENSORED]”. It's hard not to agree.
Not long ago, Caterpillar phones also appeared on the market. There are two actual models: the CAT B25 is the usual push-button “phone”, while the CAT B15 is an Android 4.1 smartphone.
Caterpillar CAT B15
')
For some reason, they are not offered on the Shop Caterpillar website: a separate resource, catphones.com, has been created for the mobile direction. Today, both models are sold in Ukraine, and quite officially. Included instructions in Ukrainian, and on the keys of the CAT B25 are Cyrillic characters. True, the above mentioned website has no versions in either Russian or Ukrainian, and the CIS countries do not appear on the Where to Buy page either. In general, they entered the market, but forgot to prepare properly for this very exit. (A number of curious facts speaks about total “forgetfulness,” I will give them a little lower.)
The origin of mobile devices labeled CAT is a separate topic. As it was found out, a company called Bullitt Mobile, founded in 2009 in the UK, is responsible for them. It does not have production capacity, phones are developed and manufactured in Asia. CAT B15 is assembled at the Compal facilities - the one that produces separate products for Nokia (Lumia smartphones, in the past - BookLet 3G netbook), as well as Highscreen Cosmo Android-smartphone. As for the CAT B25, which will be discussed below, it also has Oriental roots.
Nokia BookLet 3G
Highscreen Cosmo
In Russia for sale almost complete analog CAT B25 - teXet TM-510R. The fact that these products are close relatives and are going to the same factory, first of all says design. Take a look at this picture:
Caterpillar CAT B25 and teXet TM-510R
Appearance varies in details, although in general the relationship is obvious. I personally prefer teXet - just because of the bright color. However, with practicality, the TM-510R is also somewhat better: for some reason, a metal socket with a brand logo was attached to the back panel of the CAT B25, with which the paint peels off over time. I still have it whole, but I saw on the Internet photos of the well-known B25, so in their case this panel looks scary.
However, let's do everything in order. Compared to teXet TM-510R, we will return more than once.
CAT B25 comes in a very high-quality, medium-sized box made of yellow cardboard - this is Caterpillar's signature color. (It is a pity that the phone itself was not made yellow.) In the box, besides the phone itself, there are a carabiner with a compass, cable, charger unit and a wired headset. The quality of all these accessories is below the baseboard, the usual "Chinese" in all its glory. But the user manual is translated into Ukrainian quite qualitatively (two more books included, and in each of them - instructions for a couple of foreign languages).
But then everything is much more interesting.
Firstly, the warranty card states that the phone is provided with a one-year warranty. O-h-chen is curious, given the fact that the Cat Phones website is written in large letters about the two-year warranty.
Secondly, on the last page of the same warranty card, it is expressly stated that the Chinese company LeadSky is building the CAT B25. And there it is reported that LeadSky manufactures a similar phone for the company JCB. (Just in case: JCB is a British engineering corporation, one of Caterpillar's competitors.) She also sells her brand to manufacturers of accessories and mobile phones, and a visit to the JCB Phone website immediately revealed the Toughphone Sitemaster 2 , which is almost the complete equivalent of the CAT B25. Well, the JCB Phone brand is being promoted in the mobile market by a company ... Pru-a-Avilno, Bullitt Mobile. Thrifty Britons: CAT was “crushed” by itself, and JCB too.
JCB Toughphone Sitemaster 2
There is in the warranty card and a strange phrase about the presence in the CAT B25 GPS-receiver, which is not in it. (In nature, there are similar in capabilities protected "Chinese" with GPS, but in fact there is little use for this function: you cannot install your navigation application, as the devices do not even support Java, and the navigation built into them is based on Chinese Sunavi Navigation maps. Russia and Ukraine are not represented on them.)
What do you feel when you take CAT B25 in your hand?
Body panels are made of solid gray plastic. The back cover is covered with the same rubber as on the ends, and from the inside it is reinforced with a thick metal plate. It is attached to the body with two metal screws; On the ribbon with the carabiner hangs a small screwdriver for tightening them. In general, everything is serious. I would put the question mark just opposite the metal panel with the logo - I already described the situation with it above. Also note that the mobile phone is very thick (22 mm) and heavy (160 g). The Samsung Galaxy S4 is noticeably lighter, for example.
Comparison with Nokia 105 and HTC Titan
The wrong phone was called a brick (CAT B25 next to Just5 Brick Lebedevsky)
The screen is covered with a protective glass (well, or this is a plastic - the developers do not specify), and the matrix is ​​recessed into the case almost half a centimeter. It looks weird, but the logic of this approach is definitely there: even if the glass hits the stone or even breaks, the screen will not be damaged. In general, it is possible to throw a CAT 25 as you please: I threw the apparatus from the second floor to the ground (not to the asphalt, but to the ground), and nothing, it is very much alive. And yes, the screen (2 inches, 320 x 240) is quite a good one. Here I have a Sony Ericsson W880i, and there the display is clearly worse.
With regard to protection from water and dust, the manufacturer says the compliance with IP67. Six means that the device is fully protected from dust penetration, seven - about the possibility of working under water at a depth of a meter for half an hour without compromising performance. I immersed CAT B25 in the bathroom for an hour, and also in beer for about 15 minutes. The phone passed these tests, there were no problems, although a week had passed.
While diving in a jar of tomatoes ...
... and after him
Although in fairness it should be noted that there are quite a few reviews on the Internet like: “I bought a protected Chinese X, I threw it into the jar with cucumbers for fun and fun, but he took it and died. All goats! Yes, that happens. Therefore, personally, I would not recommend specifically subjecting such Chinese phones to harsh testing - marriage is often found in them. That is, they are guaranteed to work normally in the rain (in general, I repeatedly “clicked” in the pouring rain and regular phones, both touch and button, and this never affected their performance), but it’s obvious to swim in the sea with such mobile phones not worth it. From sin.
Moreover, there is clearly nothing to do with the sea. I am personally interested in underwater photography, but the camera in the CAT B25 ... Well, you understand - a 2-megapixel module without autofocus of the “less expensive class” class cannot afford to rely on miracles. Wonderful and not - here are some pictures taken on CAT B25:
By default, the settings are set to 320 x 240, which is not surprising - the developers expect that the photo-masonry created using CAT B25 will be used only as wallpaper for the desktop.
In general, the market really lacks such a mega-protected mobile phone with a good camera. True, there are virtually no conditions for creating it, since a good camera also needs good hardware - in particular, a powerful processor for processing multi-megapixel images. While most Chinese (including CAT B25) are based on the MediaTek MT6235 chip with a frequency of 208 MHz of the 2006 model. What kind of picture processing is there ... No, of course, some Samsung could make a protected “button” with a cool camera, resources, as they say, allow. But why - where it is better to release the next Galaxy S4 clone with slightly modified TTX.
But back to our sheep. The CAT B25 interface is a standard MediaTek software that comes bundled with the MT6235. The developers didn’t make any changes to it, although there is such an opportunity. For example, in the same teXet TM-510R (I also dealt with it) there are practically no jambs in localization, and this applies to both Russian and Ukrainian. The icons there are also their own, they were painted specifically for this model.
Meanwhile, in CAT B25 the menu is “dubovy”, you can feel the light hand of high-end Chinese designers. And translators, alas, too. With the Russian language everything is fine - there is nothing to complain about, but these are trifles. With Ukrainian everything is much worse. And the matter is not only in incorrectly translated words and capital letters in the menu items arranged in a chaotic order. I personally amused by this moment: to unlock the phone, you need to press the left soft-key, and then the button with the grid. If you set the Russian language in the settings, then after pressing the soft key, the phone will write something like this: “Click on #, and I will unlock”. If you set Ukrainian as the standard one, the phone to unlock will ask you to press "*". You press, but it does not unlock. Because you really need to click on the "#". Trifle? Oh well. I stupid about this for 5 minutes, since CAT B25 was given to me with the Ukrainian language set by default. Here you have the phone "from the manufacturer of world-class technology" ...
In general, the software part of CAT B25 is poor to disgrace. There is a WAP-browser, but I didn’t even start it - and so it’s clear that you don’t take a walk around the web. There is also a client for email, but I very much doubt that he will cope with my tasks. There is one game for which a whole item is highlighted in the main menu, there is an e-book reader, there is a calendar, calculator, currency converter, stopwatch and photo editor. All this seems to work, but ... It is difficult to use. Because it’s all very clumsy, just at the level of sensations. At the same time, Java doesn't support the phone, so Opera Mini is out of the question. If desired, the customer of the phone can fill it with applications - in the same teXet TM-510R there is also the Health program and a unit converter. For some reason, CAT Phones did not bother with this by taking a bare media platform and adding only a couple of pictures with elements of Caterpillar tractors and one “growl of a large diesel engine” ringtone.
With sound, everything is also difficult. The speaker is relatively loud, but the sound is deaf and not very pleasant to the ear. In the settings there are options “Audio effect” and “Enhance low frequencies”, but I would not risk using the CAT B25 as a player - there is no 3.5 mm connector, the complete headset is connected to the microUSB port. The quality of the headset - you know. But the radio "screams" is not bad, and it can work even without connecting a headset.
The CAT Phones website states that the CAT B25 supports microSD cards up to 8 GB. In fact, the device was eating a 32-gigabyte card and did not choke, so there is no problem with that. Another thing is that there is nothing banal to store on a flash drive of such a volume - I have already told you about the status of photos and music.
Working with two SIM-cards is implemented typically - one radio module, leaving the second SIM card offline while talking on the first one and so on. CAT B25 is incompatible with 3G networks (it doesn’t hurt at all). EDGE is also not supported, only GPRS. I would appreciate the quality of the connection on the threefold. Periodically, the connection seems to disappear for a second or one and a half, because of which sometimes individual words or even sentences do not reach the interlocutor (well, or you).
From one charge of the battery CAT B25 I have four days. And this is despite the fact that I only speak it, for other tasks this device is designed poorly. By the way, the battery has a capacity of 1,300 mAh - against 1,500 in teXet TM-510R. In general, the teXet product is inferior to the “Caterpillar” only according to the camera resolution - 1.3 megapixels instead of 2. However, this, you understand, is not critical in this particular case. But the TM-510R has better localization, a more pleasant interface, and the colors are more life-affirming. At the same time CAT B25 is estimated at about 1,200 hryvnia ($ 150, 4,900 rubles), and teXet TM-510R can be bought for $ 650 ($ 80, 2,200 rubles). Perhaps, for someone, the Caterpillar brand will be the most weighty reason for purchasing the CAT B25, but I would not be in a hurry. The factory is the same, the benefits are less ...
There are a lot of protected “Chinese” from different brands on the market now, and if you really need a phone of this type, then you should study the offers more closely. To study - and find among them, for example, the Korean Samsung C3350 for 1,100 hryvnia ($ 135, 4,500 rubles). It is head and shoulders above CAT B25 in terms of the quality of the interface and the level of implementation of functions, although the case is, of course, not as off-road (it also complies with the IP67 standard). If you choose between the C3350 and teXet TM-510R, then it makes sense to dwell on the latter, since the price difference is almost twofold.
Samsung C3350
Summing up, I’m quoting a review left by an unknown visitor on the CAT B25 page in one of the online stores: “Excavators at Caterpillar are great, but the phones are [CENSORED]”. It's hard not to agree.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/190744/
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