Hands on: Oukitel’s record-breaking K10 000 Pro should last a week

I grew enamoured with the Oukitel K10 000 when I got my hands on it at MWC 2016. After all, how ballsy is it to make a massively thick smartphone with a record-breaking 10 000mAh battery inside of it?

Then the Oukitel K10 000 Pro, the original model’s successor, found its way onto my desk, courtesy of Gearbest. So what are our first impressions thus far?

I must say that the phone comes in a rather pleasant, lightly textured box. Inside the package, we found a plastic case, SIM tool, USB On-The-Go cable, charger and cable and flip case of sorts — bring your own earphones.

Upon unboxing the phone, you’ll note just how thick it is. This is easily the thickest phone we’ve used in the past five years or so. It’s a hefty device too, at 288 grams — the S8 weighs in at 155 grams and the Redmi Note 3 has a weight of 164 grams. Heck, our featured image doesn’t quite convey how much thickness the rear adds to the device.

You’ll also notice it in your pants pocket, but I didn’t feel like the phone was dragging my pants down. You might notice the heft when actually using the phone though, as I can see hand fatigue forcing you to use two hands. Still, you can’t pack a 10 000mAh battery into a thin and light design, so it’s mostly understandable. And how many other phones can serve as a power bank?

Flip the phone over and you’ll find a rather garish metal housing for the fingerprint scanner and camera, as well as a leather back. I do like leather backs, ever since I got my hands on the LG G4. Don’t care for the material? Well, short of just using a case, you can’t switch rear covers.

Camera and software?

As for overall impressions? We’ve been using the phone for just a few hours, so we’re not quite ready to dish out a comprehensive look. But we can say it’s using a mostly lightweight version of Android Nougat, save for Oukitel’s grey and black icon pack, a themes app, old school stock camera app (blegh), sound recorder, “system manager” suite and a few other preinstalled apps.

The full variety of Google services are here though, such as the Play Store, Google Search, Google Photos, Gmail and more. No Meizu situation here.

The phone is also backed up by a 5.5-inch full HD screen, budget-focused octacore A53 MediaTek chipset (MT6750T), 3GB of RAM and 32GB of storage. So far, we’ve tried out Super Hexagon and Leap On, being two addictive titles that aren’t pushing a ton of pixels. We’ll be sure to try more demanding fare though, but these two titles ran smoothly enough.

Don’t expect the camera experience to be amazing at this point either, as daytime snaps are solid enough for social media but below the level of the Redmi Note 4 (review). Don’t even try HDR either, as it’s god-awful, ghosting everything. Still, you’re not buying this phone for the camera, right?

At this stage of using the K10 000 Pro, we’re looking at a heavy mid-range device that could probably kill someone or deflect a bullet (Nokia 3310, eat your heart out). But look forward to our extensive review in a few weeks’ time, when we cover the phone’s biggest selling point — battery life.

The Oukitel K10 000 Pro review unit was provided by online retailer Gearbest. You can buy the phone for US$179 (at the time of publication) right here. On the hunt for gadget deals? Then you should also check out Gearbest’s Autumn Bumper Harvest Sale.