How fast should your smartphone be charged exactly? Oppo sets new records for smartphone charging speeds, both for commercial smartphones and in a lab environment.
Today’s headline grabber is the incredibly fast 240W “SUPERVOOC” charging prototype, which can power a 4500mAh smartphone battery to 100 percent in nine minutes and reach 50 percent in just three and a half minutes. That’s about one percent every four or five seconds of charging time. The prototype Oppo brought to Mobile World Congress has a battery percentage readout that goes to two decimal placesso you can see those numbers are really flying up.
240W is only for a prototype phone though, and there’s no telling what these kinds of charging speeds would do to your battery after a few charge cycles. For a speed that Oppo is ready to commercialize while balancing battery life, it is also announcing a 150W charging scheme that will be included in phones this year, including a phone from Oppo’s BBK sibling, OnePlus. . (The OnePlus 10 Pro, which launched in China earlier this year, is rated at up to 80W.)
Oppo’s “150W SUPERVOOC Flash Charging Technology” is “able to charge a 4500 mAh battery from 1% to 50% in 5 minutes and all the way to 100% in 15 minutes,” the company writes. Oppo plays with the numbers a bit by starting from 1 percent, but it’s still lightning fast.
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The company says it can do this without destroying your battery, thanks to its “Battery Health Engine (BHE)”. Oppo says it has built a “custom battery management chip” for monitoring heat and other health factors, along with a new battery formula. Oppo says: “Battery Health Engine is able to keep a battery at 80% of its original capacity after as many as 1,600 charge cycles, effectively doubling battery life under current industry standards (keep a battery at 80% of its original capacity after as many as 800 charge cycles). It would take four years to charge your phone every day to reach 1600 cycles.
As we’ve said in just about every OnePlus review, these fast-charging schemes are the best features that have come to smartphones lately. When you can plug in a phone for a few minutes to get a ton of charge, user behavior changes and overnight charging is a thing of the past. Oppo, OnePlus and Xiaomi have been doing this for about four years now, and all Google and Samsung have done in response is slackening the wattages of their chargers to make them appear faster than they actually are. It would be great if the rest of the industry could catch up, but Oppo also notes that it has already been awarded more than 1,300 patents for its charging technologies.
List image by Oppo
