At this year"s Mobile World Congress, Energizer made a bit of a splash thanks to its P18K smartphone. The unit, which we got to play with on the show floor, had a massive 18,000mAh battery, which essentially made it a sort of power bank which you can use as a phone. While the concept was interesting in its own right, it seems that the public wasn"t really sold on the idea.
As reported by The Verge, the Indiegogo crowdfunding campaign for the P18K was a tremendous failure for the company. Avenir Telecom, Energizer"s partner for the smartphone business, was asking for a whopping $1.2 million to get the device out to the market, but the campaign ended today with a mere $15,000 of funding, which is a little more than 1% of the goal set by the company.
At MWC, we were told the smartphone was planned for a June release, but the campaign said that the expected shipping date would be October. Of course, even that is out of the window now that crowdfunding has failed.
In recent years, smartphones have gotten increasingly thinner, and with the reduced footprint, battery size has often suffered too. Energizer"s P18K was a gigantic leap in the opposite direction, but it seems that the world wasn"t ready to pay such a price for the privilege of having a phone that lasts a week on a single charge. The phone otherwise would have an Helio P70 chipset, 6GB of RAM, and 128GB of storage, and it could be had for $600 through Indiegogo, had the funding goal been reached.