After unveiling the Energizer P18K smartphone at Mobile World Congress in February, the folks at Avenir Technology decided to launch a crowdfunding campaign for the smartphone with a massive 18,000 mAh battery with the goal of raising $1.2 million to take the phone from prototype to actual shipping product.
They didn’t meet that goal.
The Indiegogo campaign has concluded and it raised just $15,005 from 11 backers.
When smartphone makers started to prioritize thinness, they sometimes wound up sacrificing battery capacity. In recent years, as screen sizes have gotten larger, we’ve started to see battery sizes creep up a bit, with some companies touting multi-day battery life as a selling point at a time when many phones can barely make it through a day.
The Energizer P18K would have taken that to a new level. The phone is three times thicker than a typical smartphone, thanks to a gigantic battery that’s larger than most of the standalone battery packs you can buy to recharge your phone on the go.
Maybe that was just too much.
Or maybe it’s just one of the many reasons this particular crowdfunding campaign was a flop. There are many other options you could choose from:
- Energizer isn’t really a brand known for its smartphones (and Avenir Telecom, the actual company licensing the Energizer Brand name is probably even less well known).
- Sure, a fully charged battery should last for 5 days. but when you do need to charge it, you need to keep the phone plugged in for 8.5 hours to go from 0 to 100 percent.
- The phone features a MediaTek Helio P70 processor rather than a more common Qualcomm 600/700/800 series chip
- The $549 early bird price was just too much money for people to spend on an unknown device that wouldn’t ship until October. The retail price would have been even higher, at an estimated $699.
The phone would have had a 6.2 inch, 2280 x 1080 pixel LCD display and a respectable 6GB of RAM, 128GB of storage, and five cameras — three on the back and two in a pop-up selfie section. Those specs don’t seem bad.
But seriously, this thing would have measured 0.9 inches thick. I can’t help but think that was the biggest factor in the crowdfunding campaign’s failure.
Anyway, it’s probably for the best that Avenir went with the crowdfunding route rather than mass producing the phone. At least now the company knows that while it can garner a lot of attention by bringing a phone with a crazy big battery to a trade show, that attention may not always be enough to get people to open their wallets.
via The Verge
Do I want a phone with a big battery? yes. Do I want an Energizer phone? no.
If LG, Samsung, Sony, or any of the other common Android brands made a phone with a 6,000 to 10,000 mAh battery, I would consider it.
Motorola comes close with a 5000 mAh phone (Moto G7 Power). I gotta say, it’s pretty nice!
You’ve got to go deep into Chinese territory for it at the moment (noroot firewall, change launcher, all that jazz).
However I’m quite happy with my Armor 3 (10 Ah), about 30 hours of active screen time (mostly wi-fi browsing, no SIM installed) between charges and survives pretty rough handling.
Of course, the SoC is nothing to write home about.
Yikes, that’d gotta be an awkward office environment, I’m sure they’ll try and quickly push it out of their memories. 11 backers for something that received international press.
Anyone with a power bank would know this was too heavy. Now if they had used that extra thickness, as much as an Ixus, to fit a single really good camera with an optical zoom lens…..