Smartphones with built-in projectors are on the rise – and the Tank X looks to be one of the most promising yet.

• The Tank X is a phone with a built-in 220 lumen projector
• It also includes a camping light and night vision camera
• Its battery is huge at 17,600 mAh

If you thought all phones were starting to feel the same, then you might want to take a look at 8849 – a brand you probably haven’t heard of, but which has quietly built all sorts of cool features into its phones, including projectors.

The Tank X is the latest of these phones, although we’ve already talked about the Tank 4, which has its own projector. However, this one is only 100 lumens, while the Tank X’s spotlight can provide 220 lumens of brightness.

That’s still only a tenth of what the Epson Pro Cinema LS9000 projector for example can handle, but given that the projector here is built into a phone, it’s still quite bright.

The Tank

There’s also a 1,200 lumen camping light, 6.78-inch 1080 x 2460 display with 120 Hz refresh rate, 50 MP main camera, 64 MP night vision camera, 8 MP 3x telephoto lens, 50 MP front camera, mid-range MediaTek Dimensity 8200 chipset, 16 GB of RAM and 512 GB of memory. storage.

Big, heavy and niche

With all this technology, this is of course not a slim smartphone – in fact, it’s really huge at 31.9mm thick and 750g. For comparison, the iPhone 17 Pro Max – which is rather large for a consumer smartphone – measures 8.8mm thick and weighs 233g.

But the Tank

You may be wondering about the projector and, frankly, so are we. Marketing images show the phone placed on a rock and projected onto an invisible surface. So if you can find a suitable surface, perhaps this could be a way to take movie nights with you while camping.

But while we think this feature would work better indoors than outdoors, we can see how having access to a projector anywhere and everywhere could prove useful. 8849 continues to make these phones anyway, so someone must find a use for them.

If you’re one of those people, you’ll be able to get the Tank X starting February 1, but the price hasn’t been revealed yet.

Follow TechRadar on Google News And add us as your favorite source to get our news, reviews and expert opinions in your feeds. Make sure to click the Follow button!

And of course you can too follow TechRadar on TikTok for news, reviews, unboxings in video form and receive regular updates from us on WhatsApp Also.

James is a freelance phone, tablet and wearable editor and sub-editor at TechRadar. He loves all things “smart”, from watches to lights, and can often be found arguing with AI assistants or drowning in the latest apps. James also contributes to 3G.co.uk, 4G.co.uk and 5G.co.uk and has written for T3, Digital Camera World, Clarity Media and others, with work across the web, print and TV.