Low Battery Life Not an Issue for Energizer’s New Ultra-Thick Smartphone

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Smartphones are getting better all the time but the same cannot be said about their battery life. Indeed, even the most advanced handsets will rarely last for a full day of intense usage before you need to reach for the charger, which isn’t exactly ideal. Unfortunately, there isn’t an easy way to fix the low battery life issue that most modern smartphones struggle with but Energizer recently came up with a decent, albeit somewhat inelegant, solution. The company revealed during MWC 2019 a new smartphone with a ginormous battery that is guaranteed to last much longer than anything else we’ve seen so far.

One Battery to Rule Them All

Energizer’s P18K Pop comes with a very impressive 18,000 mAH battery pack, which is way larger than anything else currently available on the market. You won’t have to worry about low battery life with this device because Energizer promises it can handle up to 50 days of standby time, about a week of occasional use or at least 48 hours’ worth of continuous video playback. That may seem like a bit of a stretch but consider that the P18K Pop’s 18,000 mAH unit is roughly six times larger than the batteries found on the iPhone XR or the Samsung Galaxy S9. In theory at least, the battery life should be about six times greater as a result.

Before you get too excited about the prospect of a phone that can potentially stay charged for weeks, it’s worth mentioning that the Energizer P18K Pop does have a pretty noticeable drawback. In order to fix the low battery life problem, the company had to develop an ultra-thick smartphone capable of housing the massive battery pack. How thick? Well, let’s just say that for all intents and purposes the P18K looks like a fancy high-tech brick. The device comes in at around 18 mm, which is about three times thicker (or more) when compared to other upcoming handsets.

Fixing the Low Battery Life Requires a Few Compromises

As far as the rest of the specs are concerned, they’re not exactly amazing. Energizer had to make a number of compromises to deal with the low battery life issue and it shows. The P18K Pop comes equipped with a 6.2-inch HD LCD display, a pop-up 16 MP selfie camera, and three more cameras on the back (12 MP + 5 MP + 2MP). A quick look under the hood reveals a Mediatek Helio P70 octa-core CPU @ 2GHz coupled with 6 GB of RAM, and 128 GB of internal storage. There’s also a microSD slot if you want to expand the storage further. The P18K Pop runs on Android 9.0 Pie.

Overall, it’s not a bad phone but it can’t really hold a candle to the handsets offered by the big dogs like Apple, Samsung, Huawei or Xiaomi. The main selling point here is clearly the battery and it looks like Energizer simply built a phone around it. An interesting concept but it’s hard to say if there’s a big market for a phone as thick as this in this day and age. The P18K Pop is set to launch this summer so I’ll guess we’ll find out then.

Jason Moth

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