New Energizer Phone

This Energizer Phone Is Thicker Than You Could Ever Want, and That's Fantastic

This honkin' huge battery will barely fit in your pocket. 

By Eric Limer


At this year's Mobile World Congress, Energizer has introduced maybe the thickest smartphone ever made: its honkin' huge Energizer Power Max P18K Pop with an enormous 18,00 mAh battery. Built by Avenir Telecom (which pays to use the Energizer name) the phone is comically thick, as hefty as about three normal handsets stacked on top of each other in order to fit a battery with more than five and half times the energy storage of the battery you'll find in an iPhone XS Max. You'd have to be kind of a lunatic to buy it, but it's fantastic that it exists.


The Power Max P18K Pop is, according to official specifications, 18mm or 7/10ths of an inch thick, storing a battery that can allegedly power two days of video playback and a standby time of up to 50 days. This is, of course, extreme almost to the point of parody, especially when you consider that the phone's absurd physical dimensions will likely make it impossible to fit into plenty of reasonably-sized pockets.

But! Despite the impracticality of this particular phone, in that it's both physically absurd and offers battery life so extreme as to be practically useless in any normal usecase, it is at least exploring under explored territory in the world of phones, specifically one of the two areas in which phones have so far mostly failed to improve even as top-tier phones trudge on and get more expensive.

The Power Max P18K Pop is unlikely to be a blockbuster, but at least it plays with the idea that phones should last longer, and have a different shape in a way that's actually practically useful and meaningful, instead of as a flashy gimmick that attempts to reverse-engineer uses for its tricks. The Pop is coming out in June for a price of 600 Euros, or around $680. And no, you might not want to buy one, but you should be glad it exists.