If your work revolves a lot around your smartphone, you would never want its battery to run out of charge. Well, that's something the smartphone industry is yet to achieve, but the new rugged phone, the RugOne Xever 8, offers a unique way by which it will never run out of charge (sort of).
Swappable batteries are back
First up, let me give you a brief introduction to RugOne if you are not aware of it. It is a new brand that was launched by Ulefone last year at IFA 2025. The first product from it was the Xever 7, and its main highlight is its swappable batteries.
As you would expect, the phone shows a black screen and becomes inoperative when you are swapping its battery. However, things are completely different with its successor, the RugOne Xever 8. The phone remains operational even when you are swapping the battery.
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The company is calling it Swappable Battery 2.0, and it keeps the device running for reportedly two minutes while you are changing the battery. During this period, you will be able to perform tasks like browsing, taking calls, and interacting with messages. This capability basically ensures that your work isn't affected while you are changing the cells.
After the two-minute limit, the phone enters a 60-second safety lockout in order to make sure that your data remains in safe hands. That said, both the batteries are 4800 mAh.
Other features of RugOne Xever 8
Swappable battery of RugOne Xever 8. | Image by RugOne
In addition to the swappable batteries, the speaker of the Xever 8 is being highly advertised. It comes with a dual speaker setup, and the company calls it SonicX Super Speaker. It can reportedly produce an output of 117 dB and can get up to 2.6X louder when used in SOS mode.
Other rugged phone capabilities of this device include an underwater camera mode, a compass, a barometer, a loudness meter, a built-in torch (230 lumens), and the ability to connect to another RugOne phone via Bluetooth and communicate with each other as walkie-talkies.
The boring specs of the device include a 6.5-inch LCD display that supports 120 Hz. Mediatek Helio G200 is reportedly powering the device, and you get two storage options: 8GB RAM with 128 GB storage and 8GB RAM with 256 GB storage.
You get a dual camera setup at the back with the main sensor being a 64 MP shooter and the other being a 20 MP night vision camera. The night camera will basically allow you to capture usable images and videos in totally dark surroundings. In the front, you get a 32 MP shooter.
The handset comes with Android 16 out of the box and has been promised three years of major OS updates. It's also worth noting that it only supports 4G connectivity.
Someone is at least doing innovation
Comment about swappable battery on Reddit. | Image by Reddit
Devices like RugOne Xever 8 really excite me, especially in the current time where manufacturers have almost stopped launching innovative products. I can't remember the last time I saw an Apple or Google product and said, "That's something new I haven't seen."
I'm not being a Samsung fanboy here, but the company definitely needs some appreciation for launching the privacy display with the S26 Ultra. For reference, it protects your privacy from shoulder surfers. Unfortunately, no such innovation has been made by Apple or Google in recent times.
The former is definitely coming up with its foldable phone, but it's not something we are seeing for the very first time. In fact, Apple is one of the last major smartphone makers to jump into the foldable territory, with companies like vivo, Google, Samsung, Huawei, and Oppo already having plenty of foldable devices available in the market.
It's high time that the Cupertino Giant do something unique with the hardware aspect of their phones, instead of solely focusing only on the software and AI department. Samsung should also not stop at privacy displays and continue building things that could prove to be beneficial for the end user. And Google… well, it needs to first resolve the battery drainage issue that has been introduced since the March update before shifting its focus towards creating something unique.
That said, the Xever 8 is apparently a device some users are actually looking for. I was able to spot a 3-month-old comment on a Reddit forum that says that the user wants a "hot swappable battery, so the phone still remains on when it is being replaced." Well, the RugOne Xever 8 delivered exactly that.
Do you miss the capability to swap out a dead phone battery?
It still might not be the best rugged phone
The Xerver 8 definitely solves a smartphone problem by giving you the option to keep your phone always active, but I still believe that it's not the best rugged phone on the market. The reason behind this is definitely some of the specifications that you don't expect from a device in 2026. As aforementioned, the handset comes with the Helio G200 that supports 4G connectivity.
It's a big step down from its predecessor, which features the Dimensity 8020 chipset and supports 5G. You generally expect the successor of a device to be superior in all aspects, but that definitely doesn't seem to be the case here.
The most obvious competitor of the phone appears to be the $560 Samsung Galaxy XCover 7 Pro. Its batteries can also be swapped, and it comes with a faster SoC than the $380 Xerver 8. RugOne has definitely addressed the high pricing complaint of the Xever 7 Pro with the Xever 8, but in order to do so, some important specifications have been compromised.
In essence, I personally think that other than the ability to keep the phone powered on during the battery swapping process, nothing seems that impressive about the device that I would recommend it, especially if budget isn't an issue for you and you can afford the Galaxy XCover 7 Pro.
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Aman Kumar is a news writer at PhoneArena covering Google Pixel phones, Android features, AI-powered smartphone tools, and mobile tech news. Before joining PhoneArena, he spent over five years writing about consumer technology for publications like MakeUseOf, How-To Geek, and Guiding Tech. His current daily drivers are the Pixel 10 and Samsung Galaxy S26 Plus, while his red iPhone SE (2nd gen) remains a personal favorite. Aman also appreciates bold smartphone experiments and still considers the Nokia N-Gage one of the industry’s most iconic designs.
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