If you’re sick of covering up your fancy phone with bulky cases and then breaking it anyway, this is definitely worth taking a look at.
- Brand: Cat
- Storage: 32GB
- CPU: Mediatek Helio A20 MT Quad core
- Memory: 3GB
- Operating System: Android 10
- Battery: 4,200mAh
- Ports: Micro USB, 3.5mm audio
- Camera (Rear, Front): Rear, Front
- Display (Size, Resolution): 13MP rear, 5MP front
- Held up to rugged testing
- Excellent battery life
- Reinforced corners for extra drop protection
- Less-than-stellar performance
- Limited internal storage
Cat S42
amazon
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Most modern phones are similar to modern cars in how they’re designed. They’re sleek, streamlined, and can be nearly interchangeable when it comes to how they look. That tends to work for most people, but not everyone.
The Cat S42 is the smartphone equivalent is a pickup truck. It’s meant to get dirty and go places where other phones dare not tread.
The question is: How well does it do its job?
Cat S42 Specifications
- OS Version: Android 10
- CPU: Mediatek Helio A20 MT Quad-core
- RAM: 3GB
- Storage: 32GB (expandable with up to 128 Micro SD card)
- Battery: 4,200mAh
- Display: 5.5-inch IPS LCD (1440 x 720)
- Dimensions: 6.35 x 3.04 x 0.5 inches
- Front Camera: 5MP sensor
- Rear Camera: 13MP sensor, f/2.0, PDAF
- Connectivity: 4G LTE, Bluetooth 5, Wi-Fi
- Features: IP68/MIL-STD 810H, Fast Charging, Dual SIM support
Design & Build Quality
While they lean heavily on the branding, Cat phones aren’t made by Caterpiller Inc., the company that makes construction equipment. That said, these phones both look and feel like they’d be right at home on a work site.
Right down to the pattern on the back of the phone—not quite tire tread, but close enough—the Cat S42 looks every bit the rugged phone it is. Fortunately, unlike some other rugged phones I’ve used, this doesn’t get in the way of usability. The phone isn’t so thick and heavy that it’s unwieldy to use.
Like some cases you’ll find for “standard” phones, the S42 features reinforced corners to help protect it from drops. We’ll look at just how well they work a little later on in the review.
The buttons aren’t dissimilar from what you’d expect to find on an Android phone. The right side of the phone holds the volume keys with the power, sleep, and wake button right below them. The left side of the phone features a golden yellow programmable button you can assign to various built-in features from turning the flashlight on to opening the calculator.
On the bottom of the phone, you’ll find the micro USB port (no USB-C here), covered with a rubber plug to keep water out. The 3.5mm headphone jack on top of the phone uses a similar cover.
Performance
I’ll say this right away: Performance on the Cat S42 isn’t great compared to most other phones on the market. Whether or not this matters much to you will depend on how you use your phone.
That said, even swiping between home screens or scrolling through apps can feel a little slow. Thanks to the limited RAM, switching between apps may feel a little slower than it would on the S42’s better-equipped Android cousins.
For raw numbers, I turned to Geekbench 5. Scores for single-core performance averaged out to around 125, while the multi-core average was 450. The app crashed every time I ran the Compute benchmark, something I’m not sure is the fault of the phone or the app.
This is a phone meant for business, and for typical business tasks like calls, messages, and emails, it’s just fine. Web browsing and other messaging apps won’t be affected much either. With that in mind, this isn’t an entertainment-focused phone and the performance reflects that.
That said, when you have phones like the AGM X3 that are both rugged and excellent performers, you can’t help but wonder what could have been here.
Software
Out of the box, the Cat S42 runs Android 10. The website promises the phone is upgradable to Android 11, but so far no update I’ve come across has brought the OS to version 11.
The S42 comes with the Cat Toolbox app pre-installed. This is a sort of mini app store that features Cat software, some of which is available on any phone, but many apps are only available on Cat phones.
This software includes Cat Financial Quote, Cat Remote Asset Monitor, and Cat Cycle Timer. Other, non-Cat apps are included as well, like BuildCalc, Invoice Maker, and Farmware. If any of these apps sound like must-haves for you, that’s a big part of whether you’re going to want a phone like the S42.
There are some other non-Google bundled apps too, including Facebook, Messenger, OfficeSuite, WhatsApp, Instagram, and Skype. Not all of these make sense on a work phone, and with everything installed, nearly 16GB of the 32GB internal storage is used up out of the box.
Fortunately, most of the bundled apps are easy to uninstall, letting you reclaim some of that storage space.
Cameras
This probably isn’t going to come as a surprise, but the cameras in the Cat S42 aren’t very good. Of course they’re not, because this isn’t the kind of phone you buy to exercise your photography chops.
That doesn’t mean the camera isn’t functional. It works, but the results just aren’t that impressive. Compared to the cameras in Google’s Pixel phones or the latest iPhones, it doesn’t stand a chance.
When it comes to getting the job done, the camera is fine. Documenting a mechanical issue and need to take a quick snap? This will handle it, because that’s exactly what the camera is meant for.
How Tough Is The Cat S42, Really?
It feels wrong to intentionally do bad things to a phone. Even though that is literally my job in this case, it wasn’t easy to do.
That doesn’t mean I didn’t do it. The weather cooperated as it rained quite a bit, giving me the opportunity to test the phone’s waterproof capabilities plus its other resistances at the same time.
I dropped the phone into a carefully chosen puddle right as FedEx arrived with another review unit. The delivery man looked puzzled, but didn’t ask why I’d just thrown a phone into a puddle.
The S42 was a bit muddy after I retrieved the phone from the puddle, as you might imagine. To remedy this, I washed it off in the sink with plain old hand soap, hot water, and a sponge. After drying, it looked and worked like new.
It’s now two weeks later as I write this, and I haven’t seen any trouble from the phone. The display is fine, all the buttons work properly, and the USB and 3.5mm jacks don’t have any issues.
Of course, accidental puddle dunkings aren’t as common as drops. I didn’t want to throw the phone at a wall or smash it with a hammer, but I tried to approximate a few accidental drops on to gravel, and the S42 handled them just fine.
Battery
Looking at the 4,200mAh battery capacity, you may expect that this phone would be decent when it comes to battery life. That didn’t turn out to be true, in fact the battery life was fantastic.
One benefit of the somewhat underpowered chipset and a relatively small amount of RAM is that it consumes less power. This means that the average-capacity battery gives the S42 above-average battery life. I didn’t use any sort of rigid testing for the battery, but instead simply noticed that it wasn’t draining especially quickly.
Even more impressive, I basically forgot about the phone for around five days while I was working on something else and found that it still had a 40% charge when I came back to it. This was only connected to Wi-Fi with no SIM installed, but still, impressive.
Most people in areas with good coverage should be able to easily go a day or two between charges. When you finally do need to charge up, it shouldn’t take that long as the Cat S42 does feature support for fast charging.
Unfortunately, the phone doesn’t have any support for wireless charging. Considering the capacity though, this is less of a deal-breaker than it may have been on another phone.
Should You Buy The Cat S42?
Whether you should buy this phone is trickier than most other phones. If you’re an independent contractor or own a construction or similar business, yes, this makes sense. If you work for someone else, the question shouldn’t be whether you buy this phone but whether your company does.
Putting that aside, from my testing, the Cat S42 seems to be a rugged phone that does what it says it does. That may not sound impressive, but not all phones that are supposedly rugged stand up to any amount of abuse.
This isn’t a phone you buy to show off, but honestly, those days are long behind us at this point anyway. If you’re sick of covering up your fancy phone with bulky cases and then breaking it anyway, this is definitely worth taking a look at.