We had a few extra minutes in Mobile World Congress to try and find the hyped, Energizer P28K phone on the show floor, and after a few minutes of trying, we finally found Avenir Telecom (the people that licensed Energizer’s name to use in smartphones) tucked away in a far-away corner of Fira Barcelona.

Anyway, as I expected, this thing was hella huge. It’s easily bigger length-wise than the Xiaomi 14 that I carried along with me, with huge bezels on all sides. The display looks to be an LCD from the looks of it.

Avenir advertises the P28K as a rugged phone, and I believe it. The device that they took to MWC looks beaten to heck, but on the flip side the frame doesn’t look physically damaged, and most of the paint flaking might have been purely cosmetic.

As far as overall thickness goes, this thing is incredibly thick, somewhat impractically so. It’s 27.8mm thick, three times the thickness of a regular iPhone 15 and it feels like a literal brick in your hands.

The main draw here is that the Energizer P28K has a 28,000mAh battery, but really, I don’t think getting this phone for that is worth it. Battery and chipset efficiency has improved quite a lot so it’s impractical for you to sacrifice size and portability to just get additional capacity on your phone. Fast chargers and large-capacity power banks have removed the need for niche, specialized devices like this. The only use case I can think of for anyone who might want this phone is if you tend to wander off in the wilderness for days at a time.

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And it’s not like you’re charging that 28,000mAh quickly either. The phone has a 33W charging speed, so you’re going to be spending close to two hours waiting for the phone to charge if you manage to drain its battery flat.

As far as the specs go, it’s pretty much an entry-level phone with a massive battery strapped to the back of it: no 5G, MediaTek MT6789. You get 8GB of RAM, 256GB, and 64MP/20MP/2MP cameras at the rear.

Avenir plans to sell the phone come October in France where it operates, but it doesn’t seem like they’re open to making this brick available in other places. The phone is priced at 249 Euros, or around Php 15K in our currency.