This Rugged Phone Is Built To Handle Anything (Except Your Pockets)

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One of the things a phone reviewer needs to know is when they are not necessarily the target audience for a given device. That's what happened here. But I have something of an obsession with "weird" phones that come around, and when I saw a modular brick of a phone with a 16,000 mAh battery at MWC, it seemed too cool for the real world, so I had to try it.

I tried it. I confirmed it was not for me.

It's not even like it is a good fit on paper. As mentioned, this phone is a brick, in size, dimensions, and weight. It's awkward and clumsy to use. But it does its job admirably in a few key ways — ways that are relevant to its target audience. But in other areas, it predictably falls short. The most interesting part about the phone comes in the modular section on the back, which I will get to.

As this phone is fairly unwieldy, I did not give it what I would consider to be a "full review period." I used the phone for about a week, for reasons that will become clear, so I'm not sure I would necessarily call this a review with a capital R. But if you buy this phone, this is what you can expect.

The Oukitel WP 300 is a monster of a phone, and predictably, the majority of its bulk is taken up by the massive battery it packs. While typical smartphone measurements are given in millimeters, it's best to measure this phone in centimeters. Specifically this phone measures 17.7 x 8.23 x 2.26 cm. It's huge. It's thicker than the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold7 and the Z Flip7, both folded, and stacked on top of each other. It's that thick.

Adam Doud/SlashGear

It's also heavy, weighing in at around 550 grams, or 1.21 pounds. I've used laptops that only weighed about 60% more than that. It's heavy enough to drag down your pants if you put it in a pocket. The iPhone 16 Pro Max that I carry, along with a magnet phone case, and ESR wallet I carry weighs in at around 400 grams and some change, and that's the really funny part.

At first when I unboxed this phone, the dimensions blew me away. But after a while, I noticed that the phone at 2.26cm thick is just about as thick as my iPhone, case, and wallet, and only about 120-120 grams heavier. In terms of thickness, that's not so bad. In terms of weight though — that's a lot of extra weight.

It's the weight that gets you. Not only is this phone heavy in a pocket, it's heavy to hold. It's also too thick to really use effectively one-handed. To prove the point, when I need to use my iPhone one-handed, I'll open the wallet stand on the back and use it to hook onto my hand, making the phone thinner and eliminating the possibility of dropping it.

But that's ok. This phone is not meant for the 9-to-5 crowd. It's meant to be a tough, rugged phone that lasts for days, and it does that very well. If you're an outdoors person who finds themselves off the grid fairly often and for long stretches at a time, this is the phone for you.

You cannot properly review a phone like this without talking about the battery first and foremost. What's interesting about this phone is that in that week-long review period, I never had to charge it. I took the phone off the charger on Friday evening, and had to plug it in six days later, but it's important to put a few things into context.

As mentioned, this phone is unwieldy and not pocketable — or at least not comfortably pocketable. I carried mine in a shoulder bag. What that did was turn my phone into an intentional product to use. I didn't glance down at my phone to check Instagram or Threads. I didn't read a book on it. I didn't...do much on the phone to be honest, because it was not easy to do so.

That's not necessarily a bad thing. We could all use a smartphone detox every now and then. Not to stereotype, but if you're a camper, or on a camping trip, your phone shouldn't really be your primary form of entertainment. So, the fact that I didn't use the phone nearly as much as most other phones contributed to its longevity.

When I ran a video playback test, playing a 4K movie on a loop using VLC player, with airplane mode on and location services off and brightness at full, the phone lasted for 24 hours and 35 minutes. That sounds impressive, until I point out that I ran the same test on the Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra (with less than one third the battery) and it lasted 25 hours and 21 minutes. Of course, this phone costs less than half of the S25 Ultra and has rugged chops besides.

It's also important to note that this phone ships with a 45W charger and cable in the box, which also sounds impressive. But it takes the phone six hours to charge from 5% to full. I have nights when I don't sleep that much, so charging the phone overnight won't necessarily get you there which is a little crazy.

The Oukitel WP300 comes with IP68 and IP69 water and dust resistant ratings, which is awesome for a phone like this. Not only can the phone stand up to water immersion, but it can handle water jets as well. It looks the part too.

The phone is boxy, almost octagonal in shape with fur chopped off corners. The SIM tray doesn't require a pin, but a fingernail to remove, and there is a rubber gasket in there protecting the insides. The buttons are tough and very clicky and the USB-C port on the bottom has a rubber cover over it for further ingress protection.

The phone has metal rails on the side and a metal camera housing, and it otherwise covered with what feels like a polycarbonate shell which is nice and grippy and doesn't slide of a table like a modern flagship phone. Speaking of the camera housing, it has raised corners on the camera housing to protect it and the modular screen on the back of the device.

That modular piece on the back is another interesting addition. With a press of a button, you can pop that modular piece out and it becomes an earpiece, just like those dongles from the 1990s and 2000s. Yes, the rubber earpiece is tucked underneath the modular piece and fits in your ear. It's quite comfortable actually. Call quality is pretty good. I was able to hear callers effectively and there were no audio complaints on the other end. If that was where the functionality ended, that would be pretty handy. It is not, however.

In the box, you also get a watch casing for the earpiece so you can wear the modular piece as a smartwatch. It tracks your steps, serves notifications, and even can act as a shutter button for the camera if you so choose. It's pretty wild, though I should mention that at one point the earpiece fell out of the watch attachment and I didn't notice it for about 30 minutes. When I noticed it was missing, there was no find option, so I pulled up my heart rate readings and saw that it stopped tracking my heartbeat at a certain time. When I went back to where I was at that time, I found it lying on the ground.

If I had been out, I don't know, hiking or something, that earpiece would have been lost. So I'm not a fan of it in that regard, but it's really interesting that the modular piece turns into an earpiece or watch as you need it. The watch itself lasts for two or three days and then needs to be popped back into the phone to charge.

While you wear the watch, rather than have a gaping hole in the back of your phone, you can fill it with the other module that's included — the camp light. This is an extremely bright floodlight (Oukitel doesn't list and official brightness in lumens, but believe me, it's bright) that can slot into the back of the phone. You can activate the floodlight from an app in the phone, or you can put it in the watch and use it there. Oukitel also includes a headband that you can attach to the module holder (after detaching the watch band) so you can wear the light like a headlamp.

I would have preferred it is, instead of requiring you to detach the watch band, you could use the elastic band in conjunction with the watch band to turn the watch into a headlamp, but that's not the case. Getting the watch band off was not easy, so that was a bit annoying, but once attached, the head lamp works great.

You may have noticed that I haven't yet talked about the camera or the internal Mediatek Dimensity 7050 processor yet, so now I will. They both exist. That's really all that needs to be said about them.

The camera set in particular is not great. You can take photos with the phone, but there's no optical image stabilization, and the second camera is a 2-megapixel macro camera that's good for...nothing really.

The processor scores a 924/2451 single/multi-core score on Geekbench which is not impressive in the slightest. But that's fine. You're not going out in the woods to play "Diablo 7." You're going into the woods to get away from "Diablo 7."

What's nice is that you get a standard 12 GB of RAM and 512 GB of storage. Those specifications are impressive. So there's that.

But you're not buying a phone that you'll be staring at all day every day. You're buying a pone that you can toss in your backpack and leave on a picnic table so that you can stay in touch when you need to, and otherwise go chill by the campfire. That's perfectly okay.

If you want the most powerful phone you can buy, you have options. If you want a conversation starter, like a foldable, you have some great options now. But if all you want is a phone that lasts for your weeklong camping trip to the boundary waters, this is the phone you should buy. The price is currently $419 on Oukitel's website, or $499 on Amazon.

If you are a camper, or someone who uses their phone sparingly and does not mind carrying it around in a bag, purse, or literally anywhere other than your pocket, this isn't a bad pickup. I liked having the watch/earpiece around when I needed to make or receive calls and it was nice having a smartwatch that lasted for days. If you are literally anyone else, then this is probably a pass for you. But that's ok; not every phone has to be for everyone. This is a phone targeting a very specific niche and it fills that niche admirably.