The best phones today can do more than ever before, with more numbers across a variety of specs and features, promising a better experience than ever before. There are devices with three, four and even five cameras. Storage goes up to 1TB, RAM up to 16GB, displays hit 120Hz and beyond. While all of these features are nice to have, there’s one numerical trend in particular that I’ve watched with great interest is the ever-rising fast-charging limit.
While fast charging was once defined as 18W, 22W, or even 30W, many upcoming smartphones now claim to be able to charge your phone eight to ten times faster than the average of the above numbers. It’s a feature that’s limited to Android phones for now, and it’s one of the few new features I’ve seen in recent years that goes beyond gimmicks to be genuinely useful.
Death from battery anxiety
Some of the best Android phones I’ve used this year competed for the title of “fastest charging phone.” Be it the Realm GT 3 which made headlines for its blazing 240W speeds, the VivoX90Pro or the Motorola Edge40 ProAndroid brands are running down the best possible way by reducing the time it takes to charge your phone.
Battery anxiety has always been one of the most irritating, yet inevitable, parts of smartphone ownership. As your phone gains functionality, its power demands increase; just like a bodybuilder requires more and more food to maintain his mass. Those bright, fast displays, increasingly capable cameras, AI capabilities, and more need extra horsepower to function. Running bigger and bigger batteries also means your phone has to spend more time on the charger, even with newer hardware that allows for higher efficiency and therefore higher performance per watt.
With more traditional forms of fast charging, Google’s Pixel 7 Pro can take up to two hours to charge its 5,000mAh battery from empty to full, as can the Pixel 6 Pro. The iPhone has a significantly smaller cell and yet it still takes over an hour to reach a full charge. This means that while your phone can easily be fully charged while you sleep if you come home from work with a dead battery and need to go out again quickly, you’ll find yourself needing to ration your usage to ensure those final milliamperes are available to you. in case of a real emergency. This challenge is further complicated by the fact that smartphones have become everything from flashlights to bank cards.
Imagine, for example, using one of The aforementioned Google pixels (e.g. Google Pixel 6) to travel to another city and cause the battery to run out with your onboard ticket in the middle of the night, because it failed to reach full charge before your departure. That would be more than a little bewildering, and it’s a situation fast charging eliminates because you’re only maybe 30 or even 20 minutes away from a full charge and five minutes from a half charge.
Some positives, some negatives
The rise of ultra-fast charging has also initiated the reversal of a very annoying trend in smartphones, the removal of chargers in the box. In a trend first popularized by Apple with other manufacturers following suit, most smartphones now ship in smaller boxes with little more than a SIM tool, paperwork, and a cable.
It makes sense if you think about it. The (probably false) reason given for the omission of chargers is that you probably already have one or two lying around the house. At the same time, trading in or selling old phones often requires buying new chargers. The increased charging speed means that the old charger that was perfectly adequate for your iPhone 11 becomes woefully inadequate when plugged into an iPhone 14. That’s six of one, half a dozen of the other, and the practice of not including a charger in the packaging has even been declared illegal by some countries.
This trend has been reversed by phone brands cramming their new, super-fast chargers into the box (and these brands often add cases and other little extras as well). We bet most people don’t already have a 120W or 240W charger in their house, hence the need.
At the same time, those chargers in the box have a hidden drawback. It means that to reach the maximum advertised charging speeds, you will definitely need them. Also, they are not interoperable between (some) brands. So Xiaomi’s 120W adapter will work with Redmi phones that support such speeds, but it won’t work with Oppo phone with 120W charging, however, those Want works with realme 120W charger and so on. It’s a little confusing, but only if you jump from phone to phone as often as I do. If you’re careful with your phone charger and have a spare just in case, you’ll be fine.
It seems like a small step back at a time when smartphones are becoming more unified about charging, but it’s worth it in my opinion.
The bottom line
While they may lag behind lesser-known brands when it comes to charging speeds, Apple, Samsung, and Google remain the companies that dominate the smartphone market. While they offer fast charging, their relative top speeds seem positively pedestrian compared to the supporting wattage you can get from the aforementioned Chinese brands. The Pixel trails behind with up to 23W, while Apple falls in the middle at around 27W in speed. Samsung comes closest with 45W fast charging on the Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultrabut even that pales in comparison to the 80W charging that’s becoming commonplace for most mid-to-high-end Android smartphones.
Unfortunately, in the eyes of most consumers, phones from Apple, Google and Samsung offer an overall more complete package, even if they charge at less than half the speed of many competitors. Therefore, until these brands adopt significantly faster charging, it will remain a unique advantage for those brave enough to shop among other brands.
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