CAT S62 Pro review

What it is

A rugged Android phone with a FLIR thermal imager built into the back. It is aimed at people who work with their hands and would otherwise carry a separate thermal camera, and it is one of very few phones where the headline feature is genuinely useful rather than a demo.

This listing is the North America variant and advertises warranty support in the US and Canada. Ask the seller what that covers before you order.

Owners with eighteen months to two and a half years on the same unit report it still going strong. One describes himself as the phone terminator, with handsets normally lasting him a few months; this one has lasted two and a half years.

There is a cheaper version without the thermal camera

Worth knowing before you commit. The plain CAT S62 is the same rugged platform with the FLIR imager left out, and it sells for a fraction of the Pro's price.

If the thermal camera is the reason you are buying, stay here. If you mainly want a tough phone and thermal is a nice-to-have, read our CAT S62 review first — several owners report nearly buying the wrong one because listing photos for the plain S62 show thermal imagery it does not have.

The thermal camera

This is what you are paying for, so be precise about what it does. Owners consistently report that it shows temperature differences in excellent detail — hot spots in a roof where insulation is missing, a hot water line leaking inside a wall, underground sprinkler leaks.

The app reads several spot temperatures at once, as the gallery shows: place crosshairs on different parts of the scene and get a figure for each, plus a scene average. What it does not do reliably is give an exact absolute temperature — distance from the target shifts the reading by a degree or two.

If your job is finding where the problem is, that is fine. If your job requires a certified temperature measurement, this is not a substitute for a calibrated instrument.

What the older CAT phones had that this one does not

One owner who had been waiting for an S-series phone raises a specific regret: the newer model dropped the air quality sensor and the laser rangefinder that earlier CAT phones carried. He is pleased with the phone and would have been happier with the air sensor, because his trade uses it.

If you are coming from an S60 or S61 expecting the full sensor suite, check this before you order. Thermal is the only specialist instrument left.

Build, and the one part that does break

Rated for drops up to six feet onto steel. Owner accounts back this up: a solid frame, a rubber layer across the back, countless hard drops with little structural damage. One owner reports the fingerprint sensor failing after a fall from far above the rated height, which is a fair outcome.

The screen is the exception, and this is the most useful warning on this page. One owner broke the display in a two-to-three foot fall inside a machine cab, with the factory screen protector fitted. His recommendation after the fact: peel off the thin factory protector and fit two thicker aftermarket protectors instead. The body survives what the glass does not.

The touchscreen deserves a separate mention. Contractors report it as the best they have used with wet or dry, cracked hands — sensitive and accurate without being twitchy. That is a genuinely hard problem to solve and most rugged phones do not.

Networks

AT&T and T-Mobile, and the table above shows how that breaks down by generation: LTE data on both, 3G on both, 2G on T-Mobile only, and no 5G at all. Verizon and Sprint are not supported.

Owner experience adds nuance. One on T-Mobile reports routinely holding a strong signal where others nearby have none, and successfully roaming onto AT&T in remote mountain areas despite AT&T listing the phone as unsupported. Another got it working on Straight Talk, though he had to swap from a Verizon SIM to a Sprint-network SIM for his area.

So the radio is strong and the phone is more flexible in practice than the chart suggests — but Verizon remains the wall.

Everyday performance

Mid-tier and unapologetic. It handles daily use well and the price-to-performance balance is the point; nobody should expect it to keep up with a flagship. What owners praise instead is what is absent — no manufacturer bloatware, no built-in ads, nothing to uninstall on day one.

Sound is clean despite the waterproofing, and the ringtone goes genuinely loud, which matters on a site.

Battery and the power bank bundle

Rated at up to two days. Light users report going close to a week between charges, still on the original battery after two and a half years.

If the bundle with the power bank is available, owners who have several report each one refilling the phone three to four times before needing a charge itself, and holding a full charge for months in a drawer.

Two listing figures to check

The listing shows 6 GB of storage alongside 6 GB of RAM, which is almost certainly a data-entry error rather than the real capacity, and the 1280 x 720 resolution looks low for a 5.7-inch screen of this generation. With the manufacturer gone there is no official specification page left to check them against, so treat both figures as unreliable and ask the seller before ordering.

The Android version is also inconsistent: the listing says Android 10, owners describe Android 11.

Who it competes with

Against the plain S62 you are paying purely for the FLIR imager. Against the S75 it trades satellite messaging for thermal imaging, and for most working buyers thermal is the more useful of the two. Against a standard rugged phone plus a separate FLIR ONE dongle, the S62 Pro wins on not having anything extra to lose or charge.