At last, someone's fitted a tractor battery to a Samsung smartphone

Even the best phones such as the Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra and the iPhone 14 Pro  have an achilles heel: their battery. Wouldn't it be great if you could put a 30,000mAh battery into your flagship phone and have battery life measured not in days, but in decades?

Okay, probably not decades. And there are some pretty big downsides to putting such a big battery in a phone. But since when did safety, common sense and not wanting to void the warranty stop the Internet from innovating? Thanks to Redditor Downtown_Cranberry44, as spotted by 9to5Google, we now know exactly what happens if you put the kind of battery you'd expect to power a tractor into a Samsung Galaxy A32 5G, one of Samsung's best budget phones.

Does adding a monster battery make the Samsung Galaxy A32 better?

In a word, no. The battery pack is significantly bigger and heavier than the Samsung Galaxy it's attached to, adding what is apparently 30mm of extra casing and a whopping half-kilo (1lb) of weight to a phone that only weighs 205g (7oz) out of the box.

More importantly, adding such a big battery massively increases the risk of an explosion. You wouldn't be allowed to carry it onto an aeroplane – US regulations limit battery packs to 100Wh, which is just under 27,000mAh – and the sheer heft and weight of the battery means you're much more likely to hit it off something and do fatal damage to it, and perhaps anything near it. This is definitely one of those "don't try this at home" experiments.

Don't worry, though: there are safer and legal alternatives that won't get you chucked off a flight. I'm quite taken by the Anker 737 Power Bank, aka the PowerCore 24K: for power users that could well be the best power bank not just for phones, but for laptops and other power-hungry devices too.