Back in 2019 Avenir Telecom, the company responsible for creating Energizer-branded phones, arrived at MWC with a bunch of phones promising weeks of battery life. Those same phones also had all the style and aerodynamic ability of a brick, and got roasted more than a king size bag of peanuts. Unsurprisingly the company’s subsequent crowdfunding campaign completely flopped.
Five years later and Energizer phones still exist, and Aventir has another phone with an insanely large battery life at MWC 2024 — upping the ante from 18,000 mAh to 28,000 mAh. Thankfully the design of this latest model, the Energizer Hard Case P28K, won’t see you confuse it with construction materials. But that doesn’t mean it looks particularly good either.
Don’t get me wrong, this is a very chunky phone that’s 1.09-inches thick and weighs 20 ounces. For reference the Google Pixel Fold is half the weight and thickness of the P28K. That’s in its folded state, by the way, and it’s a phone that’s fairly noteworthy for weighing a lot.
Needless to say, if you threw this phone around you could probably do some damage with it. Whether it would break a glass window as easily as a brick is not something I have much expertise in. Your local anti-establishment revolutionary group may have more valuable information than I do. As long as the FBI haven’t shut them down already.
Right, so aside from the gargantuan size, what else is noteworthy about the Energizer Hard Case P28K? Well that battery isn’t being wasted, with The Verge reporting that the phone is rated to last around a week of regular usage. That includes 122 hours (almost 5 days) of talk time and 2,252 hours of standby power. That’s 94 days, or over 3 months of power — provided you don’t actually use the phone.
In the event that the phone does run out of battery, it supports 33W fast charging that gets you back to 100% in around 90 minutes. Thankfully a 36W charging brick is included in the box.
It’s also a rugged phone complete with features like extra casing, strengthened corners and protective cover over the USB-C port — which will make my colleague Josh Render very happy. That protective cover is also hiding away a 3.5 mm headphone jack, which is a real rarity on modern smartphones. That’s on top of IP69 water and dust resistance. So while we may poke fun at the P28K for its bulky design, it might be the kind of phone you’ll want to take out into the great outdoors for any extended period of time.
Other features include a 64MP main camera, accompanied by a 20MP ultra wide and tertiary 2MP shooter. The front camera is 16MP, with 8GB of RAM, 256GB of storage and a MediaTek MT6789 chipset. While we don’t know how impressive that camera would be, the chipset definitely won’t be winning any performance contests. You’re going to be stuck with 4G connectivity as well, since there’s no 5G chip here.
Of course the €250 (around $271) price tag means that the P28K is cheap enough to function as a secondary phone. For those times when an iPhone or a Samsung Galaxy are too expensive to risk damaging. Strides may have been taken to improve durability over the years, but they’re not quite on the same level as a dedicated rugged phone. And the battery life on those devices definitely can’t compete with over 5 days of regular use.
Apparently the Energizer Hard Case P28K won’t be coming to the U.S., but it will be coming to Europe this October.
