How to quickly charge your smartphone: fast charging technologies in detail
Its pretty bad that only recent phones have started to add the ability to charge to only 80% to keep the battery in the optimal zone to extend the life given how long we have known that 80% was the optimal maximum. There are also a few phones now able to power themselves from USB without using the battery which if you leave them in chargers a lot throughout the day and night seems like a good feature to have to preserve the battery further.
Maybe all the complexity around this is too much and people just want to plug it in and quick 100% as quick as possible and will change their phone regularly but its pretty wasteful. We ended up going through lots of special chargers that all do very similar things and now you get a device and it often doesn't even come with a cable let alone a charger and you are digging through the specs of your charger, cable and device to work out if its all going to mesh correctly together or you'll be stuck on slow mode. We have ended up with so many standards for getting quicker than the basic charge its going to take a while for all these devices to age out and in the meantime chargers are going to be doing QC and PD and a host of other things besides for a while.
Maybe all the complexity around this is too much and people just want to plug it in and quick 100% as quick as possible and will change their phone regularly
It's this, 100%. The nerds that care about charge temperature and battery degradation and proliferation of incompatible charging standards are a rounding error, most people just want to know it can charge fast in case they forget and need to leave soon.
I am happy with my Chargie[1], an interposing dongle which provides a Bluetooth receiver and app that lets you set arbitrary preferences on your phone and fast charge, slow charge, or turn off the charger at configurable state of charge setpoints or times.
It needs an app but doesn't mention interoperability. There, I said it. It is not perfect.
At least they allow you to set-up-in-app-and-use-without-app which is more than many products.
Also, I'd argue it's not obvious that 80% charging is better for most people. You're taking an immediate 20% cut to battery life, and chances are it will take years for it to actually be better than charging to 100%. I guess it's good to have the option, but only if you almost never need that last bit of capacity.
According to[1], the S24 has gone all the way up to 4.45V.
[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/techsupport/comments/1ayqveg/samsun...
That said "super-fast" charging on it is like 18W and still about an hour from 20%, so it doesn't really qualify as fast charging IMO, and at an hour is certainly not going to be causing any excess battery wear. It's just normal speed.
Quick charge started at 7.5W
My charge "Standard" was set in the time 500mA was supplied by most phone chargers. Just saying I am old.
There's a manual option to turn it off (charge at full rate this time only), but not to manually turn it on (such as giving it a target time to be fully charged). Older Pixels used what time the alarm was set as the target time to finish charging, which I preferred as someone who doesn't wake up at the same time every day; I'm not sure why they took that away.
I would love to see this technology come to all phones. 80% cap might be controversial but I don't think what I am asking for is controversial in the least.
Another problem is the constant charging and discharging of battery while connected to external power.
Is that actually the case? Anecdotally, all my devices which spend 99% of their time connected to external power show the least degradation in reported capacity and the best preservation of their original battery life. I'm talking about iPhones, macbooks and hp laptops.
For the latter, I have two basically identical ones, one for work and the other for home (same model number, same generation, same battery p/n). The home one rarely if ever runs on battery, it has something like 50 cycles in 4 years. The battery lasts pretty much as when it was new. The other runs often on battery and it only lasts half as much. I doubt it's a lemon, because it's the standard issue laptop at work, and my colleagues' are in the same boat.
My iphone 14 pro's reported battery health has also degraded much faster than my iphone 7's. I use it much more often on battery than the old one which spent 90% of its time plugged in. But since the devices are different, the comparison isn't as meaningful as with the laptops.
Rather than worrying about charge speeds and charge %, I’d rather just slap a new battery in after 4 years.
I never needed the phones to become as thin as cardboard
And it is only thin until you put on the bulky case. If phones put a real battery and intigrated basic protection, it would still be thinner than the current small battery/outer case situation. Most people don't need tank-like Otterbox protection, they just need something that keeps bumps and small drops from shattering something.
Yes, it does heat up due to energy losses, but I suspect that's way less hard on the battery than the same amount of heat from actual high current charging (please correct me if I'm wrong).
This means the only drawback is that my phone charging is cost-inefficient.
Maybe that's too much fuss for most people, but I'm still using a five year old Pixel 4A on the original battery and its showing no signs of reduced battery performance. I probably wouldn't put in the effort if it was easy to replace the battery, but it is not. I might be a little less aggressive about it if I liked any current phones, but I do not.
Yeah, I need my phone to just last until the end of the day. The charger is on the night stand. To Android's credit, if I have an alarm set, it'll time the charge to reach 100% as the alarm goes off.
With these habits, I've never had to replace my phone due to the battery, so going the extra mile to preserve the battery seems like an exercise in futility...
the best solution is slow charging, for which a low-power charger from your old feature phone is ideal. These devices offer a small power output of 2–5 W, stretching the charging process to 5–7 hours depending on the adapter's power and the battery capacity. This way, your phone's battery charges under the best conditions, minimizing degradation
I've been charging my iPhone this way since the iPhone 4 (trickle charging overnight) and have noticed zero improvement in battery degradation performance vs. fast charging.
As a current example, my iPhone 15 Pro, purchased a month after launch, is at 85% capacity.
My launch-day iPhone 15 Pro Max is at 95% battery health. That phone has had the 80% limit enabled since day one, and I very rarely have had to increase it for specific busy days.
My previous iPhone 12 Pro Max very quickly descended to 88% battery health after a year.
My charging habits remain the same: fast and furious Magsafe/Qi/Qi2 charging every time there is a charger nearby (remote worker, so that’s almost all the time).
I do have unpleasant thoughts about the 80% battery charge limit not being available on anything older than the 15, since it turns out it can be sideloaded via Nugget and MobileGestalt manipulation.
Not enough to push me away from the walled garden (these phones are aging better than my previous flagships from other ecosystems), but a reminder of the rough edges in it.
Also, as a hobbyist, you can pretty much get a cheap PC power supply and transform it in a very professional "every volt and power under the sun" power supply for your hobbies. That's what I did.
I disagree. 12 V is not that much for an adult when you put it on your tongue, but with today's ubiquitous technology in everything, a toddler that puts everything in his mouth, will lead to a lot of distress and fears. I prefer the existing 5V.
But PD not only already has 20V (or 19?) which can do everything 12V can, but I hear there's a new standard for going above 100W, which, presumably, works at an even higher voltage. Not sure how removing 12V specifically helps with the situation you describe.
Disclaimer, I was expecting an article with such a title to talk more about silicon anode batteries, or perhaps LTO (lithium titanate oxide) batteries that can charge in about 6 minutes (10C). It’s fine that the article doesn’t talk about that… however some of its other claims are a bit problematic.
In such a situation, the best solution is slow charging, for which a low-power charger from your old feature phone is ideal. These devices offer a small power output of 2–5 W, stretching the charging process to 5–7 hours depending on the adapter's power and the battery capacity. This way, your phone's battery charges under the best conditions, minimizing degradation. Fast charging leads to up to 1.6% battery degradation every 100 days, according to an experiment comparing 5W and 25W charging on six identical smartphone batteries.
Sorry but that’s not the correct conclusion (or advice). Fast charging to 80% at cool temperatures will give a much better lifespan than charging slowly to 100% in a warm room. The issue isn’t charging speed, it’s the heat, along with time of strain (at high SOC). In fact there are pulsed very high speed charging patterns under testing that show even lesser dendrite formation than standard charging.
For anyone wanting to learn more, I highly recommend battery university. They’re probably the best resource out there on the net for genera purpose info on lithium batteries.
In such a situation, the best solution is slow charging, for which a low-power charger from your old feature phone is ideal.
It seems like most Android phones now have a feature that does this, though you have to enable it. Mine asked me to put in the time I go to bed and the time I wake up, and it slowly charges the battery over that time period to 100%
I do hope that USB PD and (to a lesser extent) Qi takeover the charging space. There is really no reason to have every SoC vendor create their own incompatible fast charging standard.
The reason why I switched to wireless charging was because I had a phone go bad due to problems with the charge port. USB-c ports on my Pixels to tend to clog with dust and other debris, but as long as I use a wireless charger, it doesn't matter.
Wireless charging is usually worse long term because of the extra heat the coils create from the waste energy. It's probably about as bad as the really fast charging phones do now though. I principally have mine do a slow charge over night these days though as is mostly last through the day.
https://batteryuniversity.com/article/bu-808-how-to-prolong-...
There is usually some setting to limit charging to 80%, and while it depends on your model and usage, going down from 80% to 30% at the end of the day is quite typical. Then you can charge overnight (preferably using slow charging) back to 80%.
But when you need it (ex: travel), you have the option to unlock full charge and use fast charging.
I don't see why the best charger is the old feature phone's charger - the point in fast charging is that you don't have to wait too long if in a hurry. That charger is the "best" if only you have almost unlimited time to charge, like during the night.
Read on technical details of fast charging technologies. Find out why the best charger – is your old feature phone's charger.