Oukitel to release an updated, thinner model of its 10,000 mAh smartphone

The Oukitel K10000 made waves (literally) since Neowin first leaked news of the phone a little over a year ago. The phone had a 10,000 mAh battery and an extremely well optimized OS that allowed it to chug by for weeks without needing a recharge. It did have a couple of flaws, though, as with great battery capacity comes great phone thickness, and the Oukitel K10000 came in at almost 2cm at its thickest point (you read that right). It was also really heavy and, subsequently, difficult to use as a daily driver. You can check out our review of the K10000 here.

The K10000 is now being refreshed, however, with a number of different changes to address concerns that users had with the old phone:

The first and most important change is that the forced ruggedness and 'mechanical-ness' of the phone, by using sharp edges and clearly exposed screws is going away for a cleaner and more refined look, with more leather and less metal.
The phone's thickness and weight are being addressed by Oukitel as various battery and phone manufacturing advancements have been made in the year since the phone came out. The phone is still not going to be competing with mainstream devices in terms of weight and thickness, but it wouldn't be as wild as the original K10000.
The last change is that the phone's capability is going to be addressed. With the original K10000, the Oukitel engineering team decided to go for the fairly low-end Mediatek MT6735 SoC. This had its benefits in terms of power efficiency, but also had downsides in regards to performance. This time around the Oukitel team could be going for something like the Mediatek Helio P20, so the phone should be able to handle more intensive tasks a bit better and still retain that battery efficiency.

There are no details on any of the other specifications or when the phone would be released, but following on the trend, it should have three or four gigs of RAM and would be released within a couple months from now. Pricing is also anyone's guess, but the original wasn't that expensive so it's unlikely that this will be either.