Some gadgets are designed to be sleek and pretty. The Oscal Tank 1 phone is not one of those. The entire thing is built around a battery so big it competes with power banks — and not those modest 5,000mAh units either. We’re talking about a 20,000mAh ExploVolt power cell that promises an absurd 1,080 hours of standby time.
You could probably get through an entire weekend camping trip without ever thinking about a charger. All that juice is crammed into a chassis that weighs a staggering 640 grams, making it about as heavy as four average smartphones. The over-the-top specs don’t stop there, with the phone’s most eye-popping claim being its supposed 48GB of RAM.
Its ruggedness is also just as bonkers. The phone boasts top-tier IP68 and IP69K waterproof ratings alongside a military-grade MIL-STD-810H certification. These ratings have become something of a standard for durable phones — the Oukitel WP 300 we recently reviewed featured them too, but Oscal also claims the Tank 1 can survive 10-meter, or 50-foot free falls and shrug off 1,200 kilograms (over 2,600 pounds) of pressure. It even operates in a wild temperature range of -50 degrees Celsius to 70 degrees Celsius, or from -58 degrees Fahrenheit to 158 degrees Fahrenheit. All these characteristics make it one of the most durable phones on the market.
Beyond its toughness, that massive battery also allows the phone to feature a blazing 170-lumen dual-beam LED flashlight. You also get handy programmable shortcut key for quick actions. Up front is a large 6.78-inch 2.4K main display with a 120Hz refresh rate, though it stumbles with a maximum brightness of only 700 nits, which could be a struggle in the sunny conditions this phone is supposedly built for. But hey, you also get a clever 2-inch secondary screen on the back for glancing at notifications.
It doesn’t really have 48GB of RAM
Again, the Oscal Tank 1’s most eye-popping claim is its supposed 48GB of RAM, a figure that would put most high-end laptops to shame. Or does it? As it turns out, this is where things get a bit sketchy. The phone doesn’t have 48GB of physical RAM.
Instead, the top configuration comes with 16GB of LPDDR5 RAM and then uses a software trick to add another 32GB of virtual memory. This technique borrows a portion of the phone’s internal storage to act as a temporary holding area for background apps.
Unfortunately, internal storage doesn’t come close to the performance of actual RAM, so you won’t feel a massive performance leap. To put that into perspective, even a flagship phone using the latest UFS 4.0 storage is still dealing with data speeds more than ten times slower than what its physical LPDDR5X RAM can handle. More importantly, this constant swapping of data creates extra read and write cycles, which can negatively impact the long-term health of the phone’s storage.
Marketing games aside, the actual performance hardware is decent. A MediaTek Dimensity 7050 processor runs the show, providing modern essentials like 5G connectivity. The camera array is also quite unique, featuring a 64MP main sensor, a sharp 50MP selfie camera, and a cool 20MP night vision camera. The whole experience is powered by DokeOS 4.2, which is built on Android 15. The price for the base 12GB model comes in at €379.99, or a little less than $450.
