Earlier this month the company that produces phones sold under the Energizer brand name announced plans to show off a phone with a massive battery at MWC.
It’s called the Energizer Power Max P18K and it sports a 6.2 inch display and the company says it offers “weeks of battery life on a single charge” thanks to its 18,000 mAh battery.
Now that journalists have had a chance to see it in person they can confirm what should have been obvious: it looks more like a gigantic power brick than a phone.
On the one hand, it seems obvious that if you’re going to slap the Energizer name on a phone, you’d leverage the thing Energizer is best known for — batteries. On the other hand, this is really an Energizer product in name only. The phone is actually a product from a French company called Avenir Telecom, which already offers dozens of other cheap smartphones and feature phones using the Energizer name.
Anyway, the Power Max P18K Pop is probably one of the more unusual phones debuting at MWC… and that’s saying something in a year when foldable phones are starting to appear, and Nubia launched whatever the heck its Alpha is.
The Energize Power Max P18K measures 0.7 inches (18mm) thick. That makes it about the size of three iPhones stacked on top of one another, or almost 0.2 inches thicker than my laptop.
The phone has a MediaTek Helio P70 processor, a 6.2 inch, 2280 x 1920 pixel display, 6GB of RAM, and 128GB of storage as well as a microSD card reader.
On the back of the smartphone, there are three cameras with 12MP, 5MP, and 2MP image sensor for capturing depth of field and more light than you’d get from a single camera.
At first glance, you won’t see any front cameras, but that’s because the P18K has a pop-up camera that only appears when you’re using it. There are two front-facing cameras —Â a 16MP primary camera and a 2MP secondary camera.
If you’re wondering what an 18,000 mAh battery can give you, Avenir says the phone can play videos for 2-days straight, play music for up to 100 hours, or offer up to 90 hours of phone call time.
In standby, the battery lasts for up to 50 days, and under typical use, a week isn’t an unreasonable expectation.
While the phone technically supports fast charging, it still takes a long time to top off such a large battery. A representative told Engadget that it takes about 8 hours to get a full charge.
I guess the good news is that a half-charge P18K will probably run a lot longer than a fully-charged iPhone, Galaxy, or Pixel.
Oh, and this isn’t the first time Avenir has tried this stunt — last year the company unveiled the Power Max P16K Pro. I’ll let you guess what that phone’s key feature was. As far as I can tell it’s not actually available for purchase anywhere. It remains to be seen whether the new P18K Pro will ever hit the streets.
More hands-on images at Engadget, Expert Reviews, and The Verge
It’s a good start, but my dream is being able to recharge my electric car with my phone and having enough left to get through the day. More mah!
I could sell my portable generator!
I can see some applications for this. In particular food delivery by bike often requires a phone running GPS, mapping, music, and it needs the screen on all the time. If this phone were cheap (and batteries are quite cheap, not sure about the rest of it) it could be good for that.
Yet, all that thickness and they still didn’t place the rear cameras flush with the rear back !!!
I’ll never complain about the Mophie battery cases being too thick ever again.