BARCELONA — Smartphones are getting more and more powerful all the time, necessitating bigger and bigger batteries. But there's never been anything quite like the Energizer Power Max P18K Pop.
Armed with an absurd 18,000 mAh battery — no, I didn't add an extra zero as a prank — the P18K Pop can last two days of video playback or 50 days on standby according to Avenir Telecom, the company that licenses the Energizer brand and builds the phone. You need a lot of room to store that much juice, though, which is why the P18K measures 18 millimeters thick, or about 7 tenths of an inch. That's more than twice the girth of an iPhone XS, for what it's worth.
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Using the P18K is a comical experience, partly due to the size, and partly due to the design. I use a Pixel 3 as my daily driver, so you could say I prefer more compact phones. So it's little surprise that reaching across the P18K's 6.2-inch full HD+ display proved more than a little awkward, and attempting to stuff it into my jeans pocket was a struggle. You wouldn't want to walk around with this thing, that's for sure.
But what I actually find most amusing about the P18K Pro is that it wholeheartedly copies all the standard trends of smartphone design, despite the fact that it has the proportions of a brick. You get a form-fitting, slim-bezeled display, triple rear cameras (yes, triple) and even a motorized pop-out selfie lens, pulling a page from Vivo's Nex S. The back is even coated in highly-reflective, metallic-looking glass.
Head-on, from the front or back, the P18K may as well be the latest Huawei flagship (well, aside from the foldable one). And then you see it in profile, and it's actually a mile deep. The speaker holes and USB Type-C port are slotted so high on the frame, it looks like an iPhone that's been extruded almost a full inch.
What else can the P18K do aside from not run out of power? Well, should you feel guilty for sucking up an entire small city's worth of power yourself, you could share some with a friend using the phone's wired reverse charging feature. Just remember than when the phone does run out of power, it'll take 8 hours to fully recharge. (And that's with fast charging, mind you.) The P18K doesn't charge wirelessly either, probably because that would take an eternity.
Inside the phone is a MediaTek Helio P70 processor, which has about the grunt of one of Qualcomm's midrange Snapdragon 600-series chipsets. Avenir has also packed this Energizer with a formidable 6GB of RAM, though you shouldn't expect the kind of smoothness you get from a premium device. At least the P18K Pop has Android 9 Pie on board, which is more than you can say for a lot of new-ish phones; it offers 128GB of storage, too.
The Power Max P18K Pop is coming in the summer, and at €600 (or about $680), so it certainly won't be cheap. In fact, you could probably buy something about half the price with comparable specs and about a battery that's 15,000-mAh smaller — but where's the fun in that?
Credit: Tom's Guide
