The OUKITEL K10000 Pro is a major winner in the battery department and it’s not shy about that.
Smartphones have become the main tool for computing for many consumers these days and with phones being that much of a relied upon piece of hardware, it’s no surprise that many are looking for the best possible battery life that a smartphone would have to offer. Lots of smartphones come with batteries claimed to allow for two days of battery life or more, but most of those phones come with 3,000mAh or less for the battery capacity, and it can be easy for power users to drain that battery life pretty quickly. The OUKITEL K10000 Pro aims to combat battery loss with its massive 10,000mAh battery which, is more than capable of lasting about three days in a single charge for the average user. OUKITEL is known for producing phones with big batteries but the K10000 Pro comes with the largest battery out of any of its devices. Let’s take a closer look at the phone and see how it stacks up as well as what it has to offer.
Specs
There’s no doubt that the battery on the K10000 Pro is going to be a highlight point of the phone and likely the most notable factor, but it has more to offer than just a big battery. It comes with a current version of Android and quite a few other decent specs for the price. It has a 5.5-inch screen with a Full HD resolution that’s protected by Corning Gorilla Glass 5, and it’s powered by a MediaTek 6750T octa-core CPU clocked at 1.5GHz. That CPU is paired with 3GB of RAM and 32GB of internal storage, as well as expandable storage with the use of a microSD card if you have one.
There is a fingerprint sensor on the back for unlocking the device, but as is pretty common with a lot of these phones coming out of China there is no support for NFC which means the device can’t be used for mobile payments, which means the fingerprint sensor can’t be used for payment authorization, which is a bit of a letdown if you want this feature. It comes with a 13-megapixel rear-facing camera, a 5-megapixel front-facing camera, and it runs on Android 7.0 Nougat, which means multi-window support, improved Doze Mode and more. The phone also supports Dual SIM, Bluetooth 4.2, Wi-Fi 802.11b/g/n, and 2G, 3G, and 4G FDD-LTE networks.
In The Box
You don’t get much in the box with most smartphones these days but that’s a trend that many Chinese smartphone brands don’t follow as they tend to load the package with extras. In the case of the OUKITEL K10000 Pro you get the phone, which already as a screen protector applied to it, as well as a clear silicone case that comes on it. It’s also got the wall adapter and micro USB charging cable, an OTG cable, a cleaning cloth, a leather carrying pouch, and a tempered glass screen protector.
Hardware & Design
With a big battery the K10000 Pro has to be a fairly big phone, and while it’s not the largest smartphone out there in terms of sheer size it is a rather thick phone. It also has a somewhat rugged look to it but with an added level of elegance. By that we mean that it comes with a leather backing, something which you don’t generally see in budget smartphones. The leather on the back is made from Australian calf leather, though it almost feels like a rubberized or soft touch plastic. That soft touch plastic is what you will actually find on the top and bottom edges of the phone as well as part of the backside surrounding the leather portion, and the phone also features a partially metal frame. We say partially because only the sides of the frame are made of metal. The phone also has a good bit of weight to it so you’ll definitely know it’s in your pocket.
On the front you’ll find three capacitive navigation buttons as well as the front-facing camera to the left of the earpiece, and if you flip the phone over to the back the rear-facing camera, LED flash, and fingerprint sensor are all surrounded by a metal plate. On the left side of the frame you can find the SIM card tray, and on the right side of the frame is where the volume up and down buttons as well as the power button are located. On the top there’s a 3.5mm audio port for plugging in headphones, and finally on the bottom is where you can find the charging port as well as the single speaker. Also worth noting is that the phone has pretty rigid corners, which makes it a little bit uncomfortable to hold, especially for longer periods of time and if your fingers brush against these corners, as they can feel kind of sharp. That said, this isn’t a deal breaker but it might be an annoyance for some.
Display
This is a Full HD display so the clarity is decent and picture quality is about what you’d expect if you’ve used a phone with a Full HD screen before. Color accuracy is good, viewing angles are good, and brightness levels come through nicely just like they do on most phones. With some of the phones that come from Chinese manufacturers you might get the option to change out the color temperature of the screen if you feel it’s a bit too warm or a bit too cool, but that’s not an option you’ll find on the K10000 Pro. In fact much of the phone looks like stock Android. You have an app drawer that’s situated vertically for scrolling through your apps, and the settings menu looks just like other stock Android device running on Nougat, though there are some extra feature for the software which we’ll get into later in the software portion of this review.
For screen response the K10000 Pro does pretty well as it didn’t seem to give us any trouble during our time using it, which is great if you’ve had issues in the past with devices that miss your touch responses every so often. One really nice addition to the display tech, which is really more of a software thing, is the inclusion of a blue light filter to help with eye strain during use in darker situations. Phones like the Pixel and Pixel XL (as well as others) have this type of filter built in so that when using the device later at night it won’t affect your sleep as much. You can easily turn this on from the quick settings panel in the notification shade, making it quickly accessible and easy to turn on and off at a moment’s notice. For the most part it’s a well-rounded display. It’s not earth shattering by any means but you shouldn’t be disappointed.
Performance
How the phone performs is always going to a main factor for many users when looking at a device for a possible choice, and it’s one of the bigger points that we like to test out. If you use your devices often enough then having a good performing device is important to ensure that you are able to efficiently complete your tasks, and if you like to play games on your phone then performance is a good thing to have here too. While MediaTek processors like the one inside the K10000 Pro are not the top of the line processors for mobile devices on the market, MediaTek has come a long way and it shows here. To test out the performance we tried playing Need For Speed No Limits as it contains some pretty high-quality graphics. During gameplay everything honestly felt buttery smooth and there was absolutely no lag, at least not that we noticed.
This should also mean that you’ll have no issues with multitasking, and for the most part it doesn’t, but we did see a tiny bit of lag when just navigating the phone and its menus, though it wasn’t excessive or anything like that so the average user may not even take notice of it. This small bit of lag that pops up every now and then could be due to having only 3GB of RAM when most phones with Nougat seem to come with 4GB, but as stated it’s not very noticeable so overall the performance of the K10000 Pro is pretty good.
Sound
Most smartphones come with less than desirable sound that has no chance of matching up to a nice pair of headphones or a Bluetooth speaker, but it’s always better when you have dual stereo speakers, and the K10000 Pro unfortunately doesn’t fit into this category. Even more unfortunate is that the single speaker it does have doesn’t have very good audio. The sound was a bit tinny at higher levels and it was actually harder to hear than I expected, leading me to having to turn the volume just about all the way up to get some decent sound for when playing games or streaming music or videos. Only one speaker isn’t always an issue, but OUKITEL doesn’t seem to have put much focus into the audio quality of the device. This isn’t the worst thing possible but it might not sit well with those who look for good speakers on their mobile devices. The short of it is that the OUKITEL K10000 Pro doesn’t have the best sound quality and this is definitely one of the weakest features of the phone. If you want excellent audio from your smartphone speakers, this device just isn’t going to cut it.
Phone Calls & Network
The OUKITEL K10000 Pro is an unlocked GSM device which means it will work just about anywhere globally, save for places like the U.S. due to the exact network frequency support that the device contains. While it might work on some GSM-based U.S. networks, coverage is likely limited. I wasn’t able to get it working with my Project Fi SIM card, though it may work with T-Mobile, AT&T and others. As for which network frequencies it supports, you can view them down below.
2G: 850/900/1800/1900
3G: 900/2100
4G FDD-LTE: 800/900/1800/2100/2600
Benchmarks
The K10000 Pro isn’t designed to be a powerhouse device so one shouldn’t expect it to rank extremely highly on benchmarks, but even without high benchmark scores the device still performs well and well enough for anyone who just needs a decent, working smartphone. To test out where it sits on the rankings, we ran the K10000 Pro through AnTuTu, Geekbench 4, and 3DMark for the graphics. If you’re interested in seeing how those tests turned out you can view screenshots of those results in the gallery below.
Battery Life
If there’s one area where the K10000 Pro excels beautifully it’s in the battery department, and with a 10,000mAh battery you should expect nothing short of amazing. This is the biggest battery in a smartphone we’ve ever used so we were certain it would last a long time but we weren’t sure exactly how long. Suffice it to say we weren’t disappointed in the slightest. During our time using the K10000 Pro we were able to get on average two and half days out of it, which could easily be stretched to three or more depending on how you use the device. As for screen on time, this measured out to around 17 hours or so before finally getting down to about 15-20 percent and before it needed a charge. We also ran it through PCMark’s battery test to see how well it would stack up and it came out measuring a screen on time of 18 hours and 3 minutes, so it was pretty spot on with what we would have expected after using it. If battery life is your main concern with a smartphone, this will do the trick.
Fingerprint Sensor
Like many phones these days the OUKITEL K10000 Pro comes with a fingerprint sensor. It’s mounted on the back just under the rear camera, and while it is a bit smaller than some fingerprint sensors making it a bit more of a challenge to hit accurately, for the most part the fingerprint sensor was able to recognize my fingerprint without issue. It was a tad slow to unlock the device at first but after extended use it seemed to get quicker and then stay consistently quick afterward. This was a big plus in our book, and if you use the fingerprint sensor a lot or you plan to, it’s nice to have one that not only works pretty accurately but does so in a relatively fast manner. This is another area where the OUKITEL K10000 Pro comes out sitting pretty, even if it isn’t the absolute fastest fingerprint sensor we’ve ever used.
Software
There’s not much in the way of special software with this phone. Since it mimics a mostly stock Android experience save for some gestures and a different set of stock icons, the K10000 Pro will feel like most Android devices which don’t come with a UI overlay that was developed by the manufacturer. It does come with the blue light filter button which you won’t see on many devices natively yet, but that is starting to change it seems.
When it comes to the differences that you will find in plenty of Chinese smartphones running on Android but not on many others, the gestures add some nifty benefits that make using the device a little easier and more convenient. First, there s a gesture motion option in settings (the settings menu is where you’ll find all the gesture features) that lets you do things like tap the screen with three fingers to take a screenshot and open the camera. There’s also an option for a one-handed mode and this is particularly useful due to the size of the phone. If you have smaller hands or you just prefer to use your device with one hand and don’t want to have to stretch your fingers across the screen as much, this is an option which you will want to familiarize yourself with. The most useful of the gestures though might be the gesture unlock options. With these it’s possible to configure gestures that you can draw on screen from the locked display. There are more than a few gestures you can draw, and each one can be set to open up an app or launch a functionality. Even if you don’t utilize tools like this that often, they’re still great to have around in the event you want to use them some of the time, and it definitely makes getting to certain functions or apps quicker than unlocking the phone like normal and finding what it is you’re trying to open.
Camera
The K10000 Pro is working with a pretty standard Android camera and software. It’s a 13-megapixel sensor so the pictures that you take will be able to blow up big enough to view on a desktop or laptop, and the quality of the images is decent though not exactly amazing. There’s not a lot of options in the camera software. When you open up the UI you have your default camera mode, as well as a picture in picture mode, and a face beauty mode that’s meant to put most of the focus on the face and making the image look as good as possible. There’s no panorama mode which was kind of strange as this is usually included with most smartphone cameras.
There’s no manual mode here which means you don’t have a ton of control over how the images come out. You can’t adjust things like the exposure compensation, ISO, or anything else that you would find in a manual camera mode, though if you really want those types of features you could simply download and install a manual camera app from the Play Store. There is an HDR button available in the default camera mode and it’s always present which means you don’t have to go digging for it and you can turn it on or off on the fly. Overall image quality was ok, though if we had one minor complaint it’s that the camera seems to take pictures a little slow even with the zero shutter lag turned on. All in all the camera is not a huge strength for the K10000 Pro but it wasn’t terrible.
The Good
Massive battery that’s capable of lasting close to three days or more
Decent screen
Pretty good performance
Mostly fast and fairly accurate fingerprint sensor
Leather material for the back
Gestures
Android 7.0 Nougat
The Bad
No NFC which means no mobile payments
Sound quality was not the best
No USB Type-C
Doesn’t work very well with U.S. networks
It’s big and heavy
Wrap Up
After spending some time with the OUKITEL K10000 Pro it’s clear that what the main feature happens to be is the battery. While there are other good qualities of the phone, the main headlining feature is definitely the battery, and there’s nothing wrong with that. It’s a perfect fit for anyone who is looking primarily for a phone that they can spend less time worrying about charging, though it may fall short in some areas for some users depending on the importance of certain features. That said, the OUKITEL K10000 Pro is a major winner in the battery department and it’s not shy about it.
Should you buy the OUKITEL K10000 Pro?
If you want a phone that you can use for up to three days or so on a single charge, there probably isn’t a better phone for the job. As an added bonus it has pretty decent performance as we really had no issues with games or most other everyday uses. It’s even got a pretty decent fingerprint sensor. If these are qualities you’re looking for then the K10000 Pro is for you. If you want something with a better camera, better sound, and perhaps a smaller footprint when it comes to physical device size and that works perfectly on U.S. networks, there are better options out there.
Buy The OUKITEL K10000 Pro