How quickly do you require your smartphone to be charged? Oppo is breaking records in terms of smartphone charging speeds, both in the real world and in the lab.
The company's incredibly rapid 240 W "SUPERVOOC" charging prototype, which can charge a 4500 mAh smartphone battery to 100% in nine minutes and 50% in just 3.5 minutes, is today's headline-grabber. Each four or five seconds of charging time equals one percent. The prototype Oppo exhibited at MWC includes a battery % readout that reaches to two decimal places, so you can watch those numbers skyrocket.
However, 240 W is only for a prototype phone, and there's no way of knowing what these charging speeds will damage to your battery after a few cycles. Oppo is also launching a 150 W charging scheme that will make its way into phones this year, including one from Oppo's BBK sibling business, OnePlus, for a pace that it is ready to commercialize while still balancing battery longevity. (The OnePlus 10 Pro, which was released in China earlier this year, has an output of up to 80 W.)
According to Oppo, its "150W SUPERVOOC flash charge technology" is "capable of charging a 4500mAh battery from 1% to 50% in 5 minutes and all the way to 100% in 15 minutes." Oppo is perhaps exaggerating the numbers by starting at 1%, but the numbers are still blazing fast.
Thanks to the "Battery Health Engine (BHE)," the business claims it can do this without harming your battery. Oppo claims to have developed a "customized battery management chip," as well as a new battery chemistry, to monitor heat and other health variables. "Battery Health Engine can preserve a battery at 80% of its original capacity after as many as 1,600 charge cycles," according to Oppo, "essentially doubling the lifespan of batteries under existing industrial norms (keep a battery at 80% of its original capacity after as many as 800 charge cycles)." To reach 1,600 cycles, you'd have to charge your phone every day for four years.
These quick-charging schemes are the best features to come to smartphones recently, as we've noted in almost every OnePlus review. When you can plug a phone in for a few minutes and get a ton of energy, it changes user behavior and eliminates the need for overnight charging. For the past four years, Oppo, OnePlus, and Xiaomi have been doing this, and all Google and Samsung have done in reaction is start faking charger wattages to make them appear quicker than they are. The rest of the industry must catch up, but Oppo boasts that its charging solutions have already been given over 1,300 patents.
Listing image by Oppo
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