Energizer’s New 18,000mAh Battery Happens to Include an Android Phone
Smartphone users prize battery life. Smartphone manufacturers prize finding ways to drain batteries more quickly. Into this gap steps the Energizer Power Max P18K Pop. It’s roughly 3 to 3.5 iPhones thick, with an 18,000mAh battery and it comes with a handy strap for bludgeoning people to death.
Alright, we made that last bit up. For all the exclaiming over the P18K’s thickness — and at 18mm, it’s definitely got a badonkadonk — it’s only about 50 percent thicker than the iPhone 3G, which launched back in 2008. That fact makes the current exclamations over its thickness somewhat amusing. We’d have reacted differently if it debuted back in 2008 because the standard of comparison would have been so much larger.
According to TrustedReviews, the Power Max P18K Pop can play video for up to 48 hours straight, with 50 days of standby talk time, 90 hours of calls, and up to 100 hours of music playback. You’ll also be able to use the P18K Pop to perform various other tasks, including charging other devices, jumping vehicles, and powering up a flux capacitor. Two of them can be daisy-chained to power a lightsaber in an emergency situation. Seven of them can dial a stargate.
The device runs Android 9.0 Pie, with a MediaTek P70 processor (Cortex-A73 / A53 design, built on TSMC’s 12nm process, with an eight-core CPU and Mali-G72 GPU). It includes 128GB of storage, a modular camera unit, and 6GB of RAM. It has fast charging, as one might expect. A full battery charge reportedly takes 8 hours, which implies you’ll really only be topping this off when you sleep.
Then again, with an 18,000mAh battery, I’m not sure what you’d be doing to drain it in a day regardless. If you could drain the battery of my iPhone SE in an hour — and you can’t, even at maximum screen brightness and in low cellular connectivity — you’d still get 11 hours out of this device. If we were willing to take this kind of leap in laptops, we could all be walking around with three inch thick systems weighing 10-15 pounds.
Hrm.
energizer’s 18,000 mAh phone is extremely thick pic.twitter.com/plYzJUAbWL
— Dave Gershgorn (@davegershgorn) February 26, 2019
On second thought, maybe keep this idea in cell phones.
All joking aside, this kind of niche product probably does have some utility. There are places where cellular connectivity is low and devices need to be used at high brightness, particularly if you frequently work outside. Granted, most of us get by with external batteries or case-batteries, but I’d have to double up on two externals to match what this phone bakes in by default.
Most coverage doesn’t include performance information (the Verge implies it isn’t very good, but also notes that the unit they used at MWC was literally damaged, with a non-functional camera module). It’s possible that the device has other issues or isn’t mature yet. Iron such issues out, and the Power Max P18K Pop could win a niche for itself.