TCL’s 5,000mAh smartphone triples iPhone 6 battery capacity

A China-based smartphone manufacturer has announced a smartphone with an absolutely enormous battery.
You may not have heard of TCL, but’s it’s a big deal in China and owns a brand you should have heard of – Alcatel. Now it’s made waves with its new P618L, which puts rival handsets to shame in terms of battery capacity, as reported by Android Headlines.
That’s because
To put that into perspective, the iPhone 6 has a 1,810mAh battery – that’s nearly three times smaller than TCL’s.
Even the beefier iPhone 6 Plus has a comparatively teeny 2,915mAh cell juicing the Apple phablet.
Battery life is a common issue of contention in the smartphone space, so it’s encouraging to see a company ditch the status quo and cram in a huge cell.
The TCL P618L isn’t the first big battery blower we’ve seen mind; just last month we got a first look at the Acer Liquid X2.
Acer’s new handset makes use of a 4,000mAh battery, which it claims offers over two days of charge.
Unfortunately, the main problem with a phone like the TCL P618L is that it will take significantly longer to charge than the iPhone 6.
While that’s not a problem for most, it might annoy users who are used to plugging their phone in for about an hour.
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Interestingly, the rest of the P618L’s spec sheet is fairly underwhelming – that might be because there was no room for any more components after the behemoth battery.
We’re looking at a 5-inch 720p Super AMOLED display with 1GB of RAM, 8GB of storage, a 1.2GHz quad-core Snapdragon 410 chip, and a 13-megapixel and 5-megapixel camera pair. It runs on the ageing Android 4.4.4 KitKat but does boast 4G connectivity.
Unfortunately, it won’t be launching in the UK, so would-be customers will have to migrate to China for a device with such fearsome charge cycle potential as the P618L.
Do you want a smartphone with a 5,000mAh battery, or are you happy charging your handset daily? Let us know in the comments.