Leaving the house only to realise you’ve got next to zero charge on your phone is an awful feeling. Which is why phone companies have been jamming bigger and better batteries into their phones. They have also been using quick charging technology, which can shove hours of battery life into a phone in a matter of minutes through super smart power management via the phone’s processor. But none have been able to juice a battery quite as quickly as the five hours in five minutes claim Qualcomm has just made.
The Google Pixel XL features this year’s Quick Charge 3.0.
Qualcomm, the chip manufacturer behind the guts of nearly every top Android smartphone, including those from Samsung, HTC, LG and OnePlus, has announced a major upgrade to its own quick charge tech. The new Quick Charge 4 will, reportedly, give a phone five hours of battery life after charging for just five minutes, or up to 50 per cent of a battery’s capacity in just under 15 minutes.
Quick Charge 4 will appear in Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 835 chip, which is expected to launch early next year.
The charging speed is a major upgrade over the already very good Quick Charge 3.0 — which, in some cases, could charge your phone 80-per cent in just 35 minutes. In fact it’s nearly 20-per cent faster than Qualcomm’s charging results with Quick Charge 3.0 devices such as the LG V20, HTC 10 and Asus ZenFone 3 Deluxe.
This news comes a week after Google, tackling the exploding phone problem head on, laid out its new charging recommendations that appeared to expressly forbid Qualcomm’s Quick Charge tech. In its recommendations, Google insisted that all phone manufacturers be USB-PD compliant. USB-PD is a specification intended to make USB-charged devices safer and avoid issues such as fiery Samsung phones and Chrome OS laptops. Previous iterations of Quick Charge, from 1.0 up to 3.0 have not been USB-PD compliant, and many were wondering if Google’s announcement was an attempt to curb Qualcomm’s virtually ubiquitous quick charge tech.
However, the new Quick Charge 4 is fully compliant with Google’s recommendation. That’s great news for fans of phones that charge fast. Start looking for it in flagship Android phones come 2017.