8849 Hike is a $300 smartphone with a 23,800 mAh battery and a 1200 lumen flashlight

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Most modern smartphones are thin, lightweight devices meant to fit comfortably in your pocket or take up little space in your bag. The 8849 Hike is not one of those phones.

Instead it's a rugged smartphone designed for off-grid use. It has features like a massive battery that should provide days or even weeks of battery life and a built-in camp light. That's also true of the 8849 Tank and Unihertz Tank line of phones, but this model stands out because instead of a built-in video projector it has an integrated 1200-lumen flashlight that the company says is good for up to 200 meters (over 650 feet).

The 8849 Hike has a list price of $340 for a model with 12GB of LPDDR4x-4266 RAM and 512G of UFS 2.2 storage, but it's currently available for pre-order for $300. It should begin shipping by mid-September.

Key features include a MediaTek Helio G200 processor, a 6.8 inch, 10890 x 2460 pixel, 120 Hz display, stereo speakers, and a camera system that includes a 32MP front-facing camera, a 50MP Sony IMX766 primary camera, an 8MP 3X telephoto camera, and a 64MP night vision camera.

But the three things that really make this phone weird include its:

1200 lumen, 2-meter flashlight (on top)

Camping Light with bright RGB light (on back)

23,800 mAh battery

According to the product page, that battery should provide up to 118 hours of talk time, 98 hours of music playback, 48 hours of video playback, or 1800 hours of standby time. In other words, if you set aside a phone with a full charged battery and don't touch it for two months, it should still have some juice left when you finally get around to picking it up again.

The phone also supports 120W fast charging, so it only takes about 2 hours to fully recharge that battery.

One significant down side to that battery? It makes the phone heavy. Weighing almost 1.5 pounds, it's probably not a phone you're going to want to take everywhere. In fact, it's so heavy that somebody at 8849 wrote this tongue-in-cheek line in the product description:

"What's more, at 666g (1.47 lbs), the Hike can even double as a self-defense tool in outdoor settings, adding an extra layer of security."

8849 says the phone supports WiFi, Bluetooth, and NFC and supports dual SIM cards and a microSD card.

While 8849 is a company that's better known for making oddball phones and tablets with unusual features than it is for offering long-term support for those devices, the company says the 8849 Hike will ship with Android 14, but should receive an Android 15 update by the end of October. Now that Android 16 is here, that's less reassuring than it should be, but it's nice to know that users can expect at least one major software update.

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