Great news
All the better for when we tell Europe to sod off and start making our goods in the UK again.
When’s the last time a British company won Best Product at Mobile World Congress? In fact it was yesterday - but few people realise how British this product actually is. The rugged CAT S60 phone was one of the most unusual and talked about devices in Barcelona this week, sporting a thermal imaging camera. Although it’s …
"We can start by making suicide nets for the factories"
Sigh...not that again.
Compare suicide rates for the population with that of a mid size UK city and you'll find it's LOWER.
Just like the Company Towns of old, it just so happens most inhabitants work for the same company, so it's easy to say it's related to the job.
Regrettably, DAB radio is a thing in the UK.
Most people I know listen to 'radio' either at home or in their cars. At home, damn-near everybody has WiFi, and a Chromecast (roughly the same price as a low end DAB radio) will allow a choice of thousands of 'radio' stations to be listened to on any existing audio equipment with an aux-in, plus podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, whatever.
In my car, Radio 6 Music is the only DAB station worth listening to. However, the DAB signal isn't strong everywhere, and my data allowance (I don't watch YouTube videos in the pub on my phone) means I could listen to 6 Music over 3/4G with about as much reliability as DAB.
I listen to DAB a lot - Radio 4 extra and World Service aren't available on FM, and the current BBC Radio Player doesn't stream well on my set-up (and all data is over 3G). Perfectly happy with it.
My hunch is that 'everyone you know' have many similarities to your use case through working together/similar age/whatever - but there are plenty of other use cases.
Is it just me, or is there a conflict between the sentences
"We keep hearing British manufacturing is a thing of the past"
and
"With its phones it’s been able to tap into the Shenzhen economic miracle, with rapid advances in engineering and manufacturing in the Pearl River Delta, home to Huawei and Foxconn..."
Sounds more like British design to me, with outsourced-to-China manufacturing. I'm sure most of the added value is in Britain, but it's stretching things a bit to call this "British manufacturing" if the actual phones are stamped out for pennies in Shenzhen.
AO supports British industry when he can. In the past he has made the valid point that the dollar value of British manufacturing is higher than ever - it is just that it employs fewer people, because of automation.
However, he seems to be a bit under the weather at the moment, and has recently written articles on one subject and then slung in a final paragraph about another.
It has been the case that manufacturing has been done in Asia for decades, but that design was done closer to the end market; Clearly, designers in [Country] have a better understanding of consumers in [Country]. However, as living standards around the world improve, a designer in China can design a device that may past muster in the UK. Really though, if you make enough devices, then the cost of the designer per unit becomes close to zero, so you don't really save money by having your designers in low paid countries. As it is, the most famous product designers are English, German, French, Japanese and Italian and American. As perception plays a role in valuing product design (*not* Industrial Design... akin to Alaister Cooke's observation that "the national dish of America is menus"), I enjoy mulling the manufacturing history of those countries.
Put another way, if you make enough units of a single model you can throw a lot of money at the design process. Same goes for tooling costs.
"For those who get turned on by video of amorphous red/yellow/white blobs?"
According to the blurb the phone can overlay the thermal imager on pictures taken with the conventional camera. This is for practical uses (see exactly where heat is escaping from the roof) but, Rule 34 obviously applies here.
"For those who get turned on by video of amorphous red/yellow/white blobs?"
That's possible, but there may also be a market for HD thermal porn blobs. This may well be the "killer app" to drive thermal imaging quality forward!
Coat. I need to wrap up warm.
Great product, I looked at the specs and the only 'flaw' in my eyes is the 1GB RAM, but I'd expect at least 2GB system memory
The thermal imaging is ideal for my line of work as a data centre ops engineer, especially when some zealous NOC member emails me in regards to a storage array is "overheating" because Controller B hit 33ºC
My "British designed" Marshall London phone is probably Taiwanese built (I cannot for the life of me find out who manufactures the Marshall London) but again, it's a British design and brand and I love it.. (oh that has 3GB RAM) and although it's not as glitzy as an iPhone or Samsung S6 Edge, it's got some unique features, a Marshall "amplifier" type look and feel on the exterior to the nice lean and clean Lollipop distro.
Eurocratics and Eurosceptic politics aside, the British manufacturing industry is far from stagnant, it's not as vibrant as some of the Asia Pacific countries, but one thing the British can do well is design, hence Tata keeping both design and manufacturing of Land Rover/Jaguar here in Blighty as a simple example.
I just wish more British brands would commit to manufacturing within our shores, but everyone loves a bargain and it's all about the price tag... sadly!
The spec on the linked site says 32GB ROM & 3GB RAM...
"Cat S60 key features:
Strengthened Die Cast Frame
Drop proof to 1.8m, MIL Spec 810G
Super bright display (typical 540 nits), Gorilla Glass 4
4.7” HD capacitive multi-touch with auto wet finger & glove support
Optimised battery performance (3800mAh)
High quality audio experience (>105dB)
Underwater 13MP main camera with dual flash, 5MP front-facing camera
4G LTE
Snapdragon 617 octa-core processor
32GB ROM, 3GB RAM
Android™ Marshmallow"
Also immersion to 5m for up to an hour. It sounds like a pretty well spec'd handset.
EU advertised prices include Value Added (sales) Tax at around 20%, the tax rate varies between about 18% and 25% by country, however if you buy online, you pay tax at the rate of the sellers country, not your own country, so the advertised price is the price you pay and it's simpler for us, because we dont have to think about adding taxes to work out what we pay. In the US, your advertised prices don't include local taxes and you add the tax according to your state, at the point of purchase.
If you add 20% to the dollar converted price, it comes in at around €651 (based on todays exchange rate of 1.1013 USD to 1.00 EUR), which is the advertised price in Euros. So no... Europeans aren't being 'overcharged' by our manufacturers.
Apple is not going to make a phone associated with people in hard hats working on building sites. Ever. Their brand image is associated with middle and upper middle class aspirational buyers in white collar jobs.
The fact that person in the fluorescent jacket and helmet might be a chartered engineer with a doctorate and a directorship of a large civils company would escape the Apple target market, so there's no crossover benefit.
The last time I read about FLIR I was probably playing Falcon 4.0, the F-16 simulator, dodging Fan Song radars over North Korea. In just twenty years or so we've gone from having GPS and FLIR and radar warning receivers as expensive military or maritime technologies to mobile phone and car accessories.
Albeit that you can't get flare dispensers for cars, at least not yet. On a practical level it would be fascinating to know what FLIR is useful for. Agriculture? Monitoring server farms? Would these phones be cheap enough to but in bulk and use as static cameras with an internet connection?
Nice bit of flag waving, but it is made in Britain or *assembled* in Britain? The article clearly states the design takes advantage of Chinese components.
This takes nothing away from the design engineers, but can it really be described as "Made in Britain"?
And I've always wanted a thermal camera too. I had a lot of fun borrowing one and taking surreal photos of cars, my home (wow, my house is inefficient), animals, etc.
I see this is going to be marketed under the "CAT" brand in the US. Not sure if I can afford one though...
Caught in a torrential downpour three weeks ago on the Devil's Ladder, County Kerry, Ireland, I soaked this unit. I banged it on rocks whilst scrambling to the ridge top. I took spectacular photos out over the Irish coast from the summit of Ireland's highest peak, Carrauntoohil, during a glorious sun break that featured several rainbows.
I paid $629 USD for it directly from Cat's website. Best investment yet in a mobile device.