The world's MOST DURABLE smartphone has a few extra tricks...

JerryRigEverthing

Today we durability test the worlds most durable smartphone. Get a 4-week trial, free postage, and a digital scale at https://www.stamps.com...​. Thanks to Stamps.com for sponsoring the show! Ive had my eye on this Armor 24 for awhile now. Its a MASSIVE unit of a phone - with a 1000 lumin spotlight on the back, and the only phone I know of with a 22,000 mAh battery on the back. At this point its more of a powerbank that makes phone calls. What do you think? should more phones be this large?

Transcript

00:00The world's most durable smartphone is incredibly weird in more ways than one. This video is

00:05sponsored by Stamps.com, but more on them later. This guy is aptly named the Armor 24,

00:13and comes with its own tempered glass screen protector in the box, which is nice. And the

00:18phone itself, holy cow. Never have I ever seen a smartphone this thick in my entire life.

00:24The Ulefone Armor 24 has a 22,000 milliamp hour battery inside. And that's not a typo. 22,000

00:32milliamp hours is 6.5 times more battery juice than what's inside an iPhone 15. So theoretically,

00:39you could probably get away with charging this thing just once a week, with the obvious trade-off

00:44that it might not fit in your pocket anymore. We also have a 1000 lumen LED light on the backside

00:50while maintaining an IP69K water resistance rating. Now it's not all sunshine and roses though. LEDs,

01:00while ultra efficient, do generate heat when they're all smashed together. And there are 510 of these

01:06little dudes projecting simultaneously. So apparently it only works within a 30 minute window and needs a

01:12significant amount of cool down time before it can perform again. So we'll just have to wait a few

01:16more minutes. I waited about 6 minutes since I'm kind of impatient and the light wasn't even turned

01:22on that long before it had to cool down. But even with that short rest, it still won't go into its

01:27brightest level. It will however stay on medium brightness and go into a strobing mode as well as

01:32flashing an SOS Morse code signal. So far not bad for 350 bucks. The physically weakest point of any

01:40smartphone though is pretty much always going to be the screen. And in this particular case, the screen does

01:45come with a pre-installed temporary plastic screen protector, which I'll have to remove. With that

01:50gone, we can see if the actual screen is made from plastic as well, which I would almost prefer on a

01:55rugged phone. But as we work our way up through the mode scale of hardness, we pass plastic, which would

02:00scratch at a level 2 or 3, and start seeing scratches at a level 6 with deeper grooves at a level 7.

02:06The Armor 24 has a screen made with Gorilla Glass 5. It's a shame that both HTC and Kyocera stopped making

02:13sapphire screen smartphones. That leaves us with only glass as the best thing we have to work with

02:18these days. And I'll still always recommend getting a screen protector as a buffer layer,

02:22no matter what the screen is made from. Until transparent aluminum makes a debut of course,

02:27but that's a conversation for another day. The front facing camera is a 16 megapixel little guy,

02:32and the earpiece grill is still very much attached to the phone frame and will not be falling out on its

02:37own. Now turning this literal brick over on its side, we find that the edges appear to be aluminum plates,

02:43screwed onto the body like an aftermarket overlanding off-road bumper. The side mounted fingerprint

02:51scanning power button sits right below a textured metal volume rocker, and the metal plates wrap

02:57around the edge of the phone onto the back panel. The top of the phone has our good friend Mr. Headphone

03:02Jack – hello, it's been a while – along with an IR blaster for remote controlling TVs from a distance.

03:07Pretty cool feature. With soft abrasion resistant rubber everywhere. The left side has an accessory

03:13port for an endoscope or microscope attachment. Those are the snaky camera like things that can

03:19peer into ventilation shafts, or other tight spaces like plumbing or car engines to see what's going on.

03:26And of course there's the lantern button. The watertight SIM card tray holds not just one SIM card,

03:32and not just two SIM cards, but also a whole microSD card. But to be fair, you could probably

03:37park a Hot Wheels in this thing with room to spare. Making our way down to the bottom, we have our 66

03:42watt USB-C port, which is impressive, don't get me wrong, but at that speed it still takes over two

03:48hours to charge up the 22,000 milliamp hour battery. And there's just a whole lot of rubber everywhere.

03:53Metal and rubber is what this thing is made from, with a light so bright I can't even see what I'm

03:58doing on the back. Even the carbon fiber looking part is rubberized. The 510 LED beacon is covered

04:04in a hard translucent plastic with a metal border surrounding the camera units. Now the cameras are

04:10interesting. On the upper right side we have a normal 64 megapixel camera, but on the left side we

04:15have an infrared night vision camera. Both perched right above two infrared LEDs and a separate camera

04:21flash that isn't associated with the lantern on the back. The night vision camera is pretty nifty.

04:25Switching to that lens, the image turns black and white, and if I turn off the light on my desktop,

04:30my main camera that I filmed this video with can't see anything on my desk whatsoever.

04:35But the infrared camera on the Armor24 is using its humanly invisible infrared LEDs and a special

04:42sensor to visually display the night vision image on the screen so I can take decent pictures in the

04:48dark with no lights. I can't think of when I would need to use this unless I was running special ops in

04:53Wakanda or something. Taking my lighter to the 120Hz 1080p screen reveals that it starts to turn

04:59black after about 10 seconds. This shows us that the pixels are an IPS LCD and not an OLED. The pixels

05:05do mostly recover after the heat is removed, which is nice. When it comes to the bend test though,

05:10it comes to nobody's surprise that a smartphone with screwed on metal side rails and a body thick

05:15enough to be a doorstop or tire chalk does not bend, flex, creak, or snap in any way, shape, or form.

05:21This Armor24 is the strongest smartphone I've ever tested. Now I mentioned a little something about an

05:27IP69K water resistance rating, which is also something we have never seen before. And we're

05:32going to see what that's all about from the inside. There are four T4 screws holding on each of the side

05:38bumpers next to that accessory port. Having visible screws sure helps save a lot of disassembly time.

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06:07all while never standing in line or driving to the post office. Lately I've been shipping out our 2024

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06:42It was around here that I realized the visible screws on the exterior panels ended. And while

06:48that makes the side rail super easy to swap, there is no other way to enter inside the phone. This is

06:53probably one of the downsides of the superior IP69K water resistance rating. The 69K doesn't supersede the

07:00IP68. They are ratings used in conjunction, side by side. The 69K means that we've maintained the

07:06submerging rate of the IP68, but adds the ability to be blasted at close range with high pressure,

07:13high temperature water jets. Cause who doesn't get into freak high temperature water jet fights.

07:19So calling on my decades worth of experience taking apart smartphones, it's time to enter in through the

07:24screen. Where surprisingly the heat from my gun roasts the IPS display even more than my lighter did.

07:31And even then the IP69K glue does not separate. There is no repairability of the Armor 24 without

07:38ruining the screen, but wow does it go out with flying colors.

07:44With the fireworks finished, the screen lifts away from the beefy aluminum midframe,

07:48which has 15 regular Phillips head screws holding it in place. And boy oh boy, the Armor 24 has more

07:55aluminum built into its thick structural midframe than the iPhone has in its entire body. I'll unplug

08:02the massive 22,000 milliamp hour battery just like a little Lego. This is turning into less of a

08:07smartphone and more of a power bank that makes phone calls. Speaking of which, the 66 watt USB-C port can

08:13also output 10 watts of power to charge other devices. That's a tad low in my opinion given the battery size,

08:20but I'll take what I can get. There's another 8 screws holding down the battery cradle and 5 screws

08:25holding down the motherboard. With the motherboard out, we can see quite a lot of regular vibration

08:30resistant packing foam on the back, which shows us that all the thermal dissipation is happening

08:35through the large metal midblade, since no heat can exit out the rubber back of the Armor 24,

08:40especially with the epically thick grid of plastic and air pockets. These are probably why the 1000 lumen

08:46has a time limit and a long cool down period. The heat from the LEDs just has nowhere to go.

08:52The 22,000 milliamp hour battery comes out next inside an aluminum capsule that looks like it was

08:58built by Iron Man himself. The upper grid of plastics can be removed. The cameras are still attached to

09:04this piece, and the rear LED pad is very securely and very permanently attached to the back of the phone.

09:10There's no removing those LEDs no matter how much we might want to. As for the infrared lights,

09:15they are both here next to the ultra small coin style vibrator motor. And it appears that neither

09:20the 64 megapixel night vision camera nor the 64 megapixel main camera have optical image stabilization.

09:27This is an absolutely wild phone with very interesting features, and I'm looking forward

09:32to whatever they come out with next. Thanks a ton for watching. I'll see you around.

09:36I don't know.

09:50I'm in the background of this.

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