The iPhone X is beautiful, no doubt. It’s also expensive as all get-out, and the Samsung Galaxy S9 is shaping up to be the same. We’re finally reaching the platonic ideal of a smartphone: a big, slick slab of screen that looks pretty, costs a fortune, has a good camera, and runs all the apps. Cool, good, great. Also boring! Extremely, savagely, stultifyingly boring.
Thank goodness for this year’s crop of weirdos coming out of the woodwork.
As 2018 Mobile World Congress looms, the new crop of devices make it clear that the titans of phonemaking are still reluctant to fix any of the things that are actually wrong with phones or to meaningfully innovate in other ways. Apple’s flashy new “Face ID” exists almost entirely to replace perfectly good Touch ID (though Animoji karaoke is legitimately wonderful). Google’s Pixel 2’s most interesting feature was that you can squeeze it. The Galaxy S8 experimented with little more than a dedicated button for its awful version of Siri. The upcoming GS9, slated to be unveiled at the show, appears to have no real surprises up its sleeve.
But not everything is boring. Strange new phones from brands like Energizer and Caterpillar (neither of which actually build their own phones, but rather slap their names on white-label hardware from other manufacturers) are trying to push the boundaries of a saturated market with decidedly weird phones. They probably won’t be great, but at least they’re interesting.
In addition to its mouthful of a name, Energizer’s Power Max P16K Pr is rumored to have a comically large 16,000 mAh battery. That is more than eight times the capacity of the battery you’ll find in an iPhone 8. It’s more than four times the capacity of phones that use giant batteries as a selling feature, like Razer’s “gaming phone,” which is a weirdo in its own right. Assuming the leaks are correct, the P16K is a chunky powerhouse with multiple days of battery, despite otherwise standard specs. It won’t unseat a $1,000 flagship, sure, but at least it takes on the issue of crappy phone battery life.
Caterpillar’s new S61 goes even farther with its uncommon features. The company better known for its giant construction equipment followed up last year’s S60 with a new phone that not only contains a FLIR thermal camera(!) that can stream Predator vision live to the internet, but also has an air-quality sensor, a laser measurement system, and a military-grade durability rating. No, it won’t challenge an iPhone X or Galaxy S9 in terms of fit and finish. Some of its specs, like the meager 1080p screen, are downright bad. And it’ll still cost you about $1,000. Unless you have some very specific heavy-duty needs, this probably isn’t the phone you want to buy. But it is staking out some strange new ground.
Neither of these weirdos are destined to be blockbusters. Each will be bad in its own way. Good smartphones are hard to make! There’s a reason that the most polished and expensive ones are largely the same. Still, strange experiments that push the boundaries stand a chance of making everything better. People might not need a battery as enormous as Energizer’s, but maybe the market for that phone will show that batteries could stand to be bigger than they are right now. Livestreaming thermal camera footage is overkill for anyone who’s not a professional handyman, but maybe laser measurement is something every phone should have.
As consumer tech careens towards the beautiful and the boring (and the blisteringly expensive), it’s good to see there’s still some experiments happening out there. So bring on the weirdos. Let’s see how wild we can get.