Mlais MX Base review

Now we come to the real meat of the Mlais MX Base, in quite a literal sense given that the battery takes up 67g of the phone's total 164g (my own measurements; Mlais's official weight is 168g).

It's a 4300mAh unit, but having tried many a battery that doesn't match up to its supposed milliampere count, I was initially a bit sceptical.

While the MX Base may not last double the length of all budget rivals with 2xxxmAh units, it does last a very long time indeed. This is a phone you don't have to try incredibly hard to squeeze two days' use out of – indeed, unless you're streaming video or doing a fair bit of browsing, it's easy.

One little anecdote shows you the real benefit of a phone like this. One night during testing, I was going out to see a band. I was using the Mlais MX Base as my regular phone, and thought the dingy venue would be a good test for the camera. So not only did I need it to last until 11.30pm in case of any public transport disasters, I'd be using the camera throughout the evening too.

Thanks to that giant battery, I was able to leave the house with 50-odd per cent battery remaining, with the confidence that I'd be fine. And I was. A night of WhatsApp'ing, taking loads of a photos and bit of browsing only shaved 20% or so off the battery.

To give you a less anecdotal take on the Mlais MX Base's stamina, I put it through some more rigid tests. The first was the usual techradar video playback test, wherein we whack the brightness up to the max and play a 90-minute 720p MP4 file.

This took out 12% of the battery. The Moto G (2015) lost 19% and the Sony Xperia M4 Aqua 25%. The Mlais MX Base is already setting the standard.

Next up I tried browsing the web, using a simulation designed to mimic near-constant Chrome-flicking. With the brightness again set at 100%, three hours of browsing ate away 41% of the battery.

Again, this is a terrific result, suggesting you'll get a minimum seven hours 20 minutes browsing over Wi-Fi with the display burning the charge away.

Kicking things up a notch further, I tried a gaming test. Ninety minutes of Real Racing 3 depleted the battery by 28%, implying that the Mlais MX Base would be good for over five hours of gameplay on a full charge.

The Mlais MX Base may not be fancy, but like an 80s action movie baddie you have a throw a load of crap at it to take it out.

Even on standby the battery performs well, which is likely helped by having a fairly recent CPU. After loading the phone up with apps, running everyday favourites like Facebook and a half-dozen others, then leaving it on a shelf for a whopping 53 hours, the Mlais MX Base only lost three per cent battery.

I also kept an eye on it after the test to make sure the battery reporting wasn't just lagging behind the reality. It's still kinda of hard to believe, though – I doubt whether the MX Base would still be alive after 73 days on standby, as that result might suggest.

You get the idea, though: it's good stuff.

As with the rest of the Mlais MX Base's hardware, there is a slight concern about the quality of the battery. Is this actually a decent-quality power pack? Poor-quality batteries tend to hold charge for less long and see a stamina hit sooner than good batteries.

I can't guarantee that this battery will hold charge as well in six months' time, but the fact that the MX Base's standby result is so good suggests it can't be dreadful unit.

Mlais has put precisely zero effort into making the MX Base quick to charge, mind. As well as not being compatible with any of the fast-charging standards, which is perfectly acceptable for a phone of this price, it comes with a dismal 1A charger. For this kind of battery, a 2A one is the minimum you're after.

As a result it takes five hours to charge the Mlais MX Base from empty. Some phones can be almost fully charged in 40 minutes: ouch. You really need to charge the phone overnight to get a full juice-up, which is the dark side of having such a huge battery in a fairly no-frills phone.