I have been using CAT phones for a few years. They really are tough, work pretty well with gloves, do not care much about water, etc. Can recommend, and the infrared sensors are worth it just for the wow effect alone :). From the downsides - some of the smaller things break faster than you'd like (e.g. laser meter, or rubber covers for the USB port, or the painted/glued layer on the back in one of the older models). These downsides do not invalidate the main purpose(s) of the device. Also the phones rather quickly fall out of the supported Android version range, but this seems to be a common problem with all Android phones.
I've had several CAT phones. I have two S41 phones right now. Their biggest weakness is the little rubber covers over the ports. Those are the first to go. They need a better solution to that problem. Wireless charging, at least.
Also, I've had two of them bulge from battery expansion, just from leaving them plugged into power most of the time. Battery repair has several week turnaround, which is why I ended up with two of them, one back from repair, unused in its box.
Plus, putting silver in the case rubber to "avoid infection" is just silly.
> Plus, putting silver in the case rubber to "avoid infection" is just silly.
Pattern matching on silver+rubber+infection, I think this might be intended to prevent 'infection' of the rubber (by rubber-eating bacteria). I can't find a citation offhand, though.
My S10e has been in the Gulf of Mexico, several feet down for a few minutes at a time, more times than I can count. I boat and fish extensively, and the phone hitches a ride in my pocket pretty frequently. Two years later, it's still going strong.
DC plus water equals electrocorrosion[1] if the pins are in contact with water. USB 5 Volts is easily enough to corrode most electronics - certainly made a huge mess of one phone I owned that got dunked while charging.
[1] electrocorrosion isn’t used much as a word, but it should be. Google electrolytic corrosion, direct current corrosion, stray current corrosion.
Galvanic is two dissimilar metals, usually with an electrolyte like wet soil or water. One metal will corrode far faster than the other e.g. zinc sacrificial anode will corrode to protect iron.
Corrosion due to electric currents is different. A few Volts in reverse and you could make iron the anode to corrode and protect a zinc cathode (Cathode and Anode depend on current direction, e.g. they swap when charging a battery).
Two parts made of the same metal can be can be corroded with an electrolyte between them, with low AC or DC voltage driving differences.
If you're worried about the wire to the charger itself, I'm sure they've thought of that if the charger is submersible. (Do any of those exist? I'm only finding a splash-resistant one.) And if the charger isn't submersible it'll be outside the bucket and the cable will be fine.
I do see some wireless charging waterproof battery banks. No cable needed for that.
I have an S41 missing its USB cover too, and have always wondered if it's still splash or water proof without it. I did find a picture of a replacement port online, and it looks like that part has a rubber seal which seems promising.
I purchased one a few years back. The lack of range and incredibly low frame rate make it virtually useless for anything more than a few feet away. I think it's meant mostly to upsell to the more expensive handhelds.
Frankly, I'm shocked we haven't seen an alternative in this segment
Yes, and particularly because some of the, hmm, "good" players out there still haven't developed domestic capabilities. I'm talking about Russia.
This is the kind of stuff that should've been completely sanctioned for decades. It's just completely fucked up to find western IR sensors in guided ammunition used against civilians in Ukraine.
Some brief research indicates that the AIM-9X and ASRAAM may both have wider off-boresight and IRCCM compared to the AA-11, with the IR sensor possibly contributing to this.
Decent infrared sensors are actually rather expensive. On top of that, the even better ones are under export controls because Russia is so bad at this game that they cannot manufacture their own sensors, thus banning exports actually makes a difference. Many of the intelligent missiles destroying Ukraine have French or other components in them. Same goes for fire control systems in tanks, or goggles used by infantry or pilots.
I did that, out of curiosity, and I'll summarize what I found in case anybody else is interested:
First, it looks like the very best options for long term support is this guy https://androidenterprisepartners.withgoogle.com/device/#!/F... (Point Mobile PM30) with "Security updates until March 2028". That's 6 years of support, if a little suspicious since it's from a company with a single device on the market.
After that it looks like Samsung offers support for their devices until "February 2027", and one other company, Zebra Technologies, offers support until "March 2027". Going to 2026 adds a few more brands (Motorola, Xiaomi, Google Pixel).
So the bulk of phones have support for 4 years, there's decent options with 5 years of support, a single device with 6 years, and nothing beyond that.
Two data points for contrast:
1. I just bought a 10 year old PC that's still useful, can run the bleeding edge of operating systems, and can be upgraded and repaired easily - I expect it to have another 5 years of useful lifespan ahead of it.
2. The iPhone 6S, released in 2015, is still supported by Apple. That's a 7 year old phone. iOS 13 (released in 2020) dropped support for the iPhone 6/6+ (2014) and 5s (2013) so 6 years and 7 years respectively.
A final note: all of this is about software support - none of this is actually about useful lifespan. Two years ago my phone crapped out on me and I used a friend's old iPhone SE (1st generation, 2016) for a couple months - it was trending hard towards a trash can. The battery lasts about 2 years before it needs replacement, the glass screen breaks easily and aftermarket replacements have touch input issues, and running the latest iOS on it had things moving slower than LA traffic.
My hope is that phones hit / have already hit the end of easy performance advancement, and a focus on longevity might start to take over. But I don't think that's likely. There is pressure from things like large institutional buyers to make generic PCs last long and be endlessly repairable - it's not really clear that pressure exists or CAN exist under capitalism, for phones.
> 2. The iPhone 6S, released in 2015, is still supported by Apple. That's a 7 year old phone. iOS 13 (released in 2020) dropped support for the iPhone 6/6+ (2014) and 5s (2013) so 6 years and 7 years respectively.
If you include years where you get a security update, but not an OS update, as Android device makers do, the 2013 5s got another update at the end of last year.
If you want lifetime software updates, consider GNU/Linux smartphones, Librem 5 and Pinephone. They run mainline Linux, which will receive updates even if the companies behind the smartphones disappear (actually, the second company already doesn't do any development).
I'm going to sound like a negative nancy, but after some casual research I did 6 months ago, I couldn't find any that were reliable as a daily driver cell phone.
For profit companies and strict legal requirements for emergency calls and such have a very good track record so far compared to most reviews I've seen.
Maybe I just don't text much, but SMS and phone calls are generally very important to me in terms of reliability. I've read some reports about one of the main contenders locking up to prevent even 911 calls in certain cases.
I'm sure many of these issues have been addressed, but it's to early for my risk level to use it as a primary device (unless I kept a backup flip phone on me all the time too)
Would absolutely love to be proven wrong though. I want to live in a world where the best software is free and open source, and you can flash it to any device capable of running it.
Tongue in cheek answer, but I would like to see the start of said support before we talk about its longevity. Because resized desktop linux is very far from what ios or android offers both on usability, performance metrics and even more so on security ones (where desktop linux has plenty space to improve as well)
> resized desktop linux is very far from what ios or android offers both on usability, performance metrics
Yes, Android and iOS have 10+ years of development at this point. However, if you compare with their first versions, GNU/Linux on mobile is good enough already.
> and even more so on security ones
It depends on what your threats are. My threats are Google and Apple. Can Android and iOS protect me? Perhaps GrapheneOS can, but longevity is more important to me.
The state of affairs is definitely dark. However the best way to improve this in the current system is to spend money on the phones that promise and deliver long support lifecycles.
> However the best way to improve this in the current system is to spend money on the phones that promise and deliver long support lifecycles.
I think a part of the problem here is the fact that I haven't seen a phone advertise this as a selling point, not once in my life. Where's the RHEL equivalent among smartphones?
Then again, I've only used mainstream Android devices and Symbian back in the day (which was an amazing time for mobile devices, in my opinion).
But that's just my point! Manufacturers are keen to shove their new fancy camera solutions and how thin their devices are and the notches and so on in my face.
Why isn't the same done in regards to the ruggedness (CAT does, other manufacturers have tried with Gorilla Glass at best), battery life (where are the smartphones that will last me a week without being recharged?) or the long support cycles (security updates for the OS, maybe even an unlocked bootloader and open source drivers)?
If i'm not overwhelmed with ads about these things (or at least don't see them advertised as one of the first things about the device), then clearly the manufacturers don't really deem it a priority/a selling point? Who knows...
It's nice to have options, but having to look for these things yourself reminds me of people talking about the year of the Linux desktop, while the majority of people out there don't even know what Linux is.
We are being flooded with 13 in a dozen smartphones and the flagship of 2 years ago is mid end of nowadays. There are Android smartphones which last long, same with smartwatches. They are rare though. User replaceable battery, hardware keyboard, foldable, rugged, thermal camera, open firmware, privacy focused OS, modular hardware. All neat innovations some of which got lost, but they are niches, and combinations of these are tough to be found. As long as the majority cares for other stuff it won't change but I ask you this: what does a Samsung S21 inherently do better than a S22? I think we are done with high specs. At some point smartphones are good enough.
I see discussion of phones supporting N years of updates in reviews pretty often. Android users I know think about it. Selection bias, perhaps, but it seems far from an arcane thing.
That feature seems to be relegated to higher end phones or certain brands though. Lower end stuff is kinda built with the expectation that it doesn't have that requirement. Sucks for sure, and I thought Google/Android was doing a lot of work to avoid blockers for upgrades... but still hasn't seemed to pay off just yet.
>A final note: all of this is about software support - none of this is actually about useful lifespan. Two years ago my phone crapped out on me and I used a friend's old iPhone SE (1st generation, 2016) for a couple months - it was trending hard towards a trash can. The battery lasts about 2 years before it needs replacement, the glass screen breaks easily and aftermarket replacements have touch input issues, and running the latest iOS on it had things moving slower than LA traffic.
The screen doesn't break that easily unless you drop it face down on a sidewalk or accidentally close it in a rat trap (don't ask). Tip for buying screens if they do, get working pulls or buy from a vendor that does high quality refurbs on OEM screens. I've had good luck with the 'premium refurbished' from injuredgadgets, their batteries have held up (even if the battery health % never goes down) as well. Ifixit's aftermarket screen had poor colors and one of my batteries turned into a spicy pillow in about a month of use, so I can only recommend them for guides and tools.
As for speed, I don't use them as a primary anymore but unless your battery is shot and iOS is throttling it, maps and payments don't seem to lag. Data speeds will be unimpressive, it can't aggregate carriers. Otherwise it works fine. For me it's a great utilitarian secondary device, basically the phone that always 'just works'. Absolutely usable, in fact there are use cases where it excels simply because it can be used with wired headphones while plugged into a charger at the same time and I can't think of any other supported device on the market able to do that.
I just looked into this issue over the weekend, since my current phone is now EOL. The newest phones from Google and Samsung just upped their support lifetime from 3 years of software updates[1][2]. Their newer phones now get 3 or 4 years of feature updates, and 5 years of security updates.
Not as impressive as Apple, but it's a welcome improvement. Soon it might actually make sense to buy older Pixel or Galaxy models without worrying about them going EOL just a year or 2 after you get them.
Just recently bought a Samsung A53 5G in part because of the extended update time frame. I was going to get the very similar A33 but it's not available in the US.
The only real lack that jumps to mind is no wireless charging, but it does have a feature I enabled immediately - capping the battery charge to 85%. With that and the updates there's a pretty decent chance that I actually will still be using the same device 4-5 years from now - possibly without the battery replacements needed on my previous phones.
If you want long-time software support on an Android device make sure to get one which is supported by AOSP-derived distributions like LineageOS. As soon as you get the device install LineageOS (or something similar) on the device and you're set (OTA updates and all - I get weekly OTA updates on a Samsung SIII-neo from 2014). Get a relatively popular device to increase the chance of the thing being supported for as long a time as possible.
Well, it’s just, people that care about longevity buy an iPhone.
And the capitalism kind of works there - iPhone is still #1 phone brand, and even rising in marketshare a bit recently. That’s despite being a bit overpriced.
And they are the richest company on Earth, or something on that level.
People do want longevity, but there seems to be something stopping Android manufacturers from that. I don’t know nearly enough about mobile drivers and mobile OS to tell you what.
It seems the main stumbling block is Qualcomm not supporting their chips beyond 4 years, as described by Fairphone here, that tries to push support of their phones to 7-ish years
I never fully understood that. Kernel drivers have to be open source, right? Maybe not mainlined, but the source should be available. So what prevents someone from taking that and then getting it into a shape to be upstreamable? Why exactly is support by qualcomm needed?
I'm not an OEM but I'll hazard a guess: long term hardware support assures that field replacements will match the exact specifications your are expecting. Large scale implementations have historically relied on a reference device to make sure you don't have a thousand different profiles running around.
Combine this with a JIT supply chain, and nobody making phones is going to want to stockpile a bunch of old Qualcomm chips they aren't sure they'll ever need.
I'm not sure if I would define 6-7 years of support as capitalism working. Apple has differentiated themselves by offering more longevity than the competition, but instead of competitive a race to make phones last longer, we've just got a choice between no longevity and a little longevity. This is the devices serving the company that makes them, not the devices serving the people who use them - which is how I define success.
I'm hoping for 15 years of usable life out of this PC. I'm expecting the iPhone I bought in sept 2020 to last me another year, maybe two. Not because Apple drops support, but because carrying something around in your pocket for years is hard on any object - and this one is not built to be repaired.
I’m sure there are physical limitations that come into play, but there’s no doubt in my mind we could do exponentially better with different market forces driving the direction of design. Look at the framework laptop, for an example of progress on longevity in a space where people have expressed similar doubts.
The bit you said about price is, I think, the key. Except I don’t think it’s so much the price as the profit margin. There a millions of people who buy a new $1200 iPhone every 1-2 years - those people could be served by a $2400 iPhone purchased every 2-4 years - but they probably wouldn’t go for that, since one of the things you’re buying when you spend the $1200 is having the new hotness, status, a perception of “luxury” etc.
Which is why I pointed the finger at capitalism in my earlier post. This system rewards what is profitable, not what is good for people + the planet.
The iPhone 1 was pretty much the start of this whole revolution of mobile computing - cut it some slack. We have seen huge improvements in camera, CPU and battery performance since, so I wouldn’t be surprised if an iPhone X would work just fine a decade after, especially that there is hardly any conceivable difference between it running ios vs the newest device and also due to the whole field slowing down in improvements as we are now in the diminishing returns territory.
I don't think this is a comprehensive list. I don't know what the exact requirements are but based on the domain it seems related to Google Enterprise policies.
As a fellow CAT S41 user, I can confirm that the phone is basically invulnerable to dropping, although one of the rubber pads did break off after a couple years of opening and closing it. My compass doesn't work, probably due to exposure to strong magnets. Gps and cellular internet still work perfectly, I can browse modern websites and watch youtube without much trouble. The battery lasts forever. The camera is kinda meh and I regret not getting the variant with a FLIR camera.
If they can make the flip-phone variant hardy enough to play football with I'll definitely buy it. But chances are, my S41 will still be working by then ;)
They have a page about the ruggedness of their products - "built rugged, perfect for construction sites, farms or extreme, outdoor environments"; "Made to military specification (MIL-SPEC 810H) - Drop-proof, dust proof and shockproof"; "[drop] tested onto concrete from up to 1.8m (6ft)"; "waterproof" with Ingress Protection level 8 or 9.
With my Galaxy, I can get a pretty good spiral when I throw it down field, but haven't had any luck so far when I punt it. I suppose I need more practice.
Or if you care about unlocking the bootloader / getting root (at least based on the S60).
Latter was possible but non-trivial, with a good chance of ending up with a brick. IIRC installing a custom OS to get recent security patches never worked (it was abandoned on Android 6).
> Or if you care about unlocking the bootloader / getting root (at least based on the S60).
It would be really cool if in the $CURRENT_YEAR we could finally get unlocked bootloaders for all of our phones and actually own the devices.
But that's unlikely to ever happen with the way how Android and manufacturers treat the OS, much like how the driver situation is nowhere near where *nix is.
Try an Android with LineageOS, it won't suddenly change underneath you unless you tell it to install a new version (full or point release, e.g. 18.1 -> 19). No surveillance, no planned obsolescence, no hassles. The source is there is you want to modify/build your own release. This also makes it possible to extend the life of the device even when LineageOS ceases support.
honestly nowadays I might even recommend graphene over lineage provided your device supports it. It's way better about security, privacy, anonymity and all that jazz
You should care about security updates. For most people, their phone has more very private data than even their laptops. And the attack surface on modern phones is absolutely massive.
This would seriously be a Killer Feature for phones for my parents. Android updates confuse the hell out of them (me, too, when I have to help them out—Google's UI design for their built-in apps is terrible, and they can't help but screw around with it in unhelpful ways every single release)
LTS Android (or iOS) with five+ years of security-only updates would be the perfect phone for them.
