FLIR One, round two: The thermal imaging camera drops $100, gets a new shape

Last year, senior editor Lee Hutchinson played with the FLIR One, a $349 iPhone case that had two embedded cameras to bring you all the power of Predator in John McTiernan’s 1987 film Predator. That is, the camera took infrared measurements of its surroundings, producing an awesome thermal image that transcended the visible spectrum.

Now FLIR, a military and industrial technology company based outside of Portland, Oregon, has come back with a second version of its consumer-grade product, priced at $249. This next-gen accessory is also called the FLIR One, but this time, the company has eschewed the iPhone case for a dongle that attaches to the bottom of a compatible iOS device via the Lightning port. Better yet, the FLIR One is no longer iOS-exclusive, and an Android-compatible dongle works with a handful of Samsung and Asus phones, as well as the HTC ONE M8 and the LG V400.

On top of that, the company is saying that the long-wave infrared sensor (called the “Lepton Core”) found in the 2015 FLIR One has four times the resolution of the one found in the 2014 FLIR One.