Honor Win RT 2 gaming phone gets a 12,070 mAh battery

Honor is taking the battery arms race into gaming phones. The company has confirmed on Weibo that the Win RT 2 will carry a 12,070 mAh battery, as Notebookcheck reports. It is one of three models in the Win 2 series, which launches in China on 21 October alongside the flagship Win 2 and a third model, the Win Turbo 2, about which almost nothing is known yet.

What Honor has confirmed

• Win 2: the flagship, with Qualcomm's Snapdragon 8 Elite Extreme Gen 6, a 10,100 mAh battery and a dual-fan cooling system.
• Win RT 2: the bigger 12,070 mAh battery, 90 W fast charging and a dual rear camera. Teaser images show a different camera island and no visible dual-fan setup, so it may use a single fan.
• Honor has not confirmed the Win RT 2's chip. Notebookcheck expects last year's Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5, but that is a guess, as is any wireless charging.

Even the Win 2's capacity is larger than what rivals such as the iQOO 16, OnePlus 16 and RedMagic 12 Pro+ offer, according to Notebookcheck. Honor has also been teasing performance all week, claiming a higher AnTuTu score than the RedMagic 12 Pro+.

Our take

A five-figure battery in a phone that still looks fairly slim is impressive on paper. But a gaming phone lives or dies on sustained performance. Hours of play push chips hard, and the Snapdragon 8 Elite Extreme Gen 6 has already faced overheating rumours that Qualcomm denied. The Win RT 2 trades the Win 2's twin fans for more capacity, so the key question is whether it can keep frame rates steady once it warms up.

Honor has not said anything about pricing or availability outside China yet. If battery anxiety is your real problem, a good power bank is still the cheaper fix.