Satellite tech is going mainstream, and Bullitt Group has a head start over its Big Tech rivals, for now.
The Cat S75 rugged 5G smartphone with Bullitt Satellite Connect.
Rugged smartphones designed for mission-critical (e.g. emergency workers and first responders), business-critical (e.g. transport, logistics), and outdoor hobbyist (e.g. hiking, skiing) use cases are widely available, but lack a key ingredient: if no cellular or Wi-Fi connection is available — and there are large areas, even in developed countries, where that’s the case — they have no means of communicating. There are dedicated satellite phones, of course, but these can be expensive, bulky, and lacking in smartphone features.
Fresh from unveiling its Bullitt Satellite Connect (BSC) service and Bullitt Satellite Messenger (BSM) OTT app at CES 2023, British company Bullitt Group has announced the fully rugged Cat S75 smartphone, a flagship 5G handset with added satellite comms capability, courtesy of BSC and BSM, at Mobile World Congress (MWC). In the US and Latin America, essentially the same Bullitt-designed and manufactured phone will be sold as the Motorola Defy 2.
The 6.6-inch Cat S75 looks more like a regular smartphone than most rugged or satellite handsets because Bullitt, in conjunction with its chipset partner MediaTek, has shrunk the satellite RF components to a manageable size as well as tweaking power consumption to eke out maximum battery life.
There’s no compromise on rugged features, though, with the S75 able to handle all manner of abuse. It can cope with drops onto steel from up to 1.8m, immersion in up to 5m of water for over 35 minutes and high-pressure water jets, as well as exposure to dust, dirt, and sand (IP68/IP69K). It has also been tested under vibration, humidity, and extremes of temperature (MIL-STD-810H), and has antimicrobial materials on external surfaces that can be washed and sanitised.
Clearly the S75 is a phone you can take almost anywhere — and with Bullitt Satellite Connect support on-board, you can have the peace of mind that comes with the availability of two-way messaging and location tracking, plus an SOS service, when you have neither cellular nor Wi-Fi connectivity.
Here are the Cat S75’s key features:
The Cat S75 is based on MediaTek’s mid-range octa-core Dimensity 930 chipset with 6GB of RAM and 128GB of internal storage, expandable via MicroSD card. The Dimensity 930’s CPU comprises two Arm Cortex A78 cores and six Cortex A55 cores, while the GPU is an IMG BXM-8-256.
