Energizer is best known for making batteries that power everyday devices and tools, but the brand has recently started coming up in phones, thanks to a licensing deal with Avenir Telecom. While most of those phones are likely to go under the radar, the P18K Pop, which was on the show floor at MWC, is a different kind of beast.
We"ve seen many companies, especially those in Asia, come up with phones that have ridiculously large batteries, as was the case with the Oukitel K10000 and its 10,000mAh unit. But Energizer has gone a lot further and put a gigantic 18,000mAh battery in the P18K Pop. As you might imagine, this makes for a comically large phone that you definitely won"t be using with just one hand.
For all that bulk, you"ll get up to 50 days of battery life on standby, 90 hours of calls, or two days of video playback, which is indeed quite impressive. It has a USB Type-C connector capable of fast charging, and, of course, you can use it as a power bank to charge your other devices. Unlike many other big-battery smartphones at MWC, Energizer didn"t make the P18K Pop a ruggedized device, and instead embraced some of the modern flagship design trends.
It has typical - sheer size aside - glass sandwich design with a metal frame all around, and it even has a fancy-looking rear cover, which fades from blue to black. It even adheres to the bezel-less trend we"ve been seeing in smartphones, having both relatively small borders around the sides and ditching the notch thanks to a pop-up mechanism that brings up two front-facing cameras. There are also three cameras on the back, making for a total of five, which is truly unexpected in a smartphone like this.
That"s not to say that the cameras are actually any good. The camera software seemed extremely basic and barebones, and picture quality appeared to be pretty bad from the rear camera. The front-facing cameras were actually just broken somehow, so I can"t really comment on them.
The device does have some decent specs, too. It comes with a MediaTek Helio P70, which is an octa-core chipset clocked at 2.0GHz, 6GB of RAM, and 128GB of storage, which can be expanded through a microSD card, and there"s a side-mounted fingerprint scanner. It ships with Android 9 Pie out of the box, though it"s not exactly a clean version of the software.
The Energizer P18K Pop will launch sometime in June, according to the company, and it should cost about €600.
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