Sadly, we forgot our rubber mallet at home so we couldn't try to beat it to pieces but we did appreciate the housing on the CAT phone it's surprisingly nice to hold and well put together.

A 3G, GSM phone, the B15 stands 4.9 inches tall by 2.7 inches wide by 0.6 inch deep and weighs a hefty 6 ounces. A burly 2,000mAh battery promises to keep talk time going for 16.3 hours. For a company that knows rugged better than it knows Android, this phone seems to have the goods.

The CAT B15 is an Android 4.1 "Jelly Bean" device, with a 4-inch, 800 x 480-pixel screen, a dual-core, 1GHz Cortex A9 CPU, 512MB of RAM and 4GB of storage memory. Of course, you're not buying this one for its specs; you're buying it for its durability, and at first sight, the B15 looks the part.

We’ve had a peek at the B15 from CAT (or Caterpillar, however you like), and found it to be both obviously able to withstand a beating and appearing to run as quick in its Android implementation as we’d expect a 2013 device to be.

The case is a unique blend of aluminum, hard rubber, and Gorilla Glass. It feels extremely solid; not all rugged phones do. It's nice to pick a phone up and immediately have confidence that it will take whatever you throw at it, or whatever you throw it at.

...the close to stock Android OS intrigues us, and we have to admit, we're charmed by the phone's sturdiness, and the eagerness of Cat rep's to beat it up for us.

These kind of phones aren’t for everyone, but if you need a phone that is going to take a pounding and keep right on running, it might be something to think about.