In racing, drivers always aim to cut down on their pit stop time (despitesometimes lasting no more than a couple of seconds), as even that short span spent stationary can prove to be game-changing. While the consequences in most cases may not be as dire for our modern, sports car-like ultrafast phones, their own pit stops haven’t gottenthatshort in all these years.
Many mainstream phones still take close to two hours to fully top up, which is a sheer letdown when you put them up against devices that take a fourth of that duration. It’s about time that smartphones matched their charging speed progression with their exponential performance gains so that they spend less time tethered to a wall charger.
The convenience of quick top-ups
A little over a year ago,I reviewed a phone from OnePlus’ sister brand Realmethat charged at a staggering 150 watts using a PD-compatible charger included in the box. With that kind of speed, the phone took no more than 20 minutes to hit 100%, which is absolutely insane for a mass-market phone. You don’t need to look far to find similar — if not slightly slower — experiences on more accessible devices; take the 100W adapterson most recent OnePlus phones, for example, that fully charge a 5000mAh battery in about 30 minutes.
This half-hour duration is plenty fast for most users to charge their phone while taking a shower and getting ready for the day, but what’s particularly helpful is the blazing fast initial top-up speed. Say, if my phone has only 10% battery remaining, I could plug it in for just 10 minutes, and it’d go well past 50%, giving me enough juice when I need a quick top-up in the evening. And that makes all the difference.
It is a lifesaver when you are in a pinch, and having just the option to fast charge in a matter of minutes and not hours whenever I want has taken away my battery anxiety for good. Super-fast charging is also why I don’t care much about wireless charging. I don’t need to have my phone constantly charging on a Qi pad while I’m at my desk.
Quick top-ups are a lifesaver when you are in a pinch, and having just the option to fast charge in a matter of minutes and not hours has taken away my battery anxiety for good.
While the benefits of fast charging are aplenty, it’s fair to assume that such high wattage is bound to produce heat and negatively impact the battery’s health. To address these concerns, ultra-fast charging tech from the likes of OnePlus and Xiaomi often use simple yet innovative methods. For instance, the battery inside some of these phones is split into two, so that the charger isn’t pumping all 100 watts to a single battery but 50 watts to each battery portion.
And since these methods are proprietary, the charger and the phone are better able to communicate to move all the heavy lifting (minutely adjusting the current, that is) to the adapter, keeping your phone’s temperature in check. This approach has worked well for me in India, where temperatures can easily hit 45°C (~113°F) during peak summer months, so the phone should work well in other cooler regions. Moreover, companies like OnePlus and Realme have told me that their batteries are tested to maintain 80% of their health even after 1600 charge cycles, which is double what other brands typically claim.
One thing that particularly surprised me was that OnePlus could pack all its heat management tricks on theOnePlus Open, which presumably already has space constraints on the inside. It doesn’t go up to a crazy 100W, but its 67W support is still snappy enough to spoil you for good.
Nope, 25W isn’t fast enough
After getting spoiled by a phone whose charging speeds top 100W, using a device that charges slowly feels like a significant downgrade, even if I’m moving to atop-tier flagship phone. Most premium options, including all iPhones, Google Pixels, and most mainstream Samsung Galaxy handsets, only support 25W of PD (Power Delivery) charging. When you’re used to your phone topping up completely in less than half an hour, seeing up to two hours of charging time on your new phone makes you want to reconsider your decision to “upgrade.”
One might argue that I can put the phone on charge overnight and wake up to a full battery. Modern phones indeed have software features to mitigate the ill effects of trickle charging, like holding the charge at 80% through the night and juicing up the remaining bit as your wake-up time approaches. Apple recently even introduced a way tolimit the iPhone’s max battery percentage to 80%to lengthen its overall life. But at the end of the day, these are just workarounds to the lack of better charging tech that has remained stagnant for most phones for years. You’re essentially adjusting your usage and behavior for your phone instead of the phone adapting to your needs.
You’re essentially adjusting your usage and behavior for your phone instead of the phone adapting to your needs.
A few phones outside the aforementioned Chinese brands do offer a better charging experience. ThePixel 8 Prosupports 30W of PD charging, while theGalaxy S23 Plusand theGalaxy S23 Ultrasupport 45W of PPS charging to charge the phone completely in a little over an hour. These Samsung phones do offer the benefits of quick initial charging to 50% in just 20 minutes, while the charging tapers off as the battery is about to juice up fully.
But the problem is that the tech is available only for some of the priciest phones on the market, while budget phones and even theGalaxy S23are left stuck with 25W charging. When Apple switched to USB-C with theiPhone 15 seriesrecently, it had the opportunity to add faster charging, but it clearly opted against this decision.
And wireless charging has also met a similar fate so far. Most phones cannot go over 15W of wireless charging, while OnePlus’ proprietary tech enabled 50 watts of wireless charging a couple of years ago, which is making a comeback with theOnePlus 12. Anew Qi2 charging standardis just around the corner, but its real innovation is the introduction of a MagSafe-like magnetic attachment for better alignment and efficiency with no improvement for the charging speed itself.
The standard challenge
It’s SuperVooc for OnePlus/Oppo, HyperCharge for Xiaomi, and TurboPower for Motorola.
While these technologies offer a supreme charging experience with their compatible chargers, they aren’t interoperable. The very thing that helps them stand out is also their biggest bane. And to add to that fragmentation, Apple, Google, and Samsung usethe more universally accepted Power Delivery systemand its multiple sub-variations across their devices, from phones and tablets to even laptops.
The very thing that helps these proprietary charging techs stand out is also their biggest bane.
Recent advancements in PD chargingallow it to hit 240W of output, but that’s reserved for bigger devices like gaming laptops because of higher voltage output. Smartphones don’t usually go over 9V, which is why you often see PD charging speeds topping out at 27W (3A at 9V). Meanwhile, Programmable Power Supply (PPS) used on the Galaxy S23 Ultra minutely adjusts the voltage to provide the exact amount of power that the phone needs and can go up to 45W.
This adds to the confusion for the users as towhich charger and cable combination is suitable for their phone— sometimes the included USB cables don’t support the full 45W speed — now that the companies have stopped including an adapter in the box.
The first Pixel phone came with ‘fast’ 18W charging. In nearly eight years since, not much had changed. And branded charging technologies aren’t the solution — these adapters tend to get bigger with the increase in wattage and the output power has diminishing returns as the max input goes up.
While the USB-C port uniformity was a major step in the direction, smartphone makers need to do more to embrace newer charging standards like GaN and PPS, and in the process make it simpler for users to find a compatible charger. Apple iPhone and Google Pixel users will benefit the most from this upgrade, while Samsung can liberate the technology to even bring its cheapest flagship and thebest budget phonesup to speed with other smartphones. With more widely available 45W PPS standard, we may notneedultra-fast (but closed-off) 100W charging technology, but we do want our phones to juice up super quickly whenever we need them to.
