Battle of the Chargers

With the experimentation always on in the mobile manufacturing industry, smartphone batteries being modified to fit themselves neatly behind the growing screen size of the devices, struggle to support the power needs of both the screen and faster chipsets. Slower to drain, the newer batteries proved slower to charge too, an issue many manufacturers handled with new standards.

The most popular charger currently, USB 2.0 typically puts out 500mA. Manufacturers too slowly started bundling more powerful chargers, going over 2A in some cases. USB 3.0 offers slightly more power than the previous standard, however, its wide adoption in smartphones doesn’t seem to be happening any sooner.

Manufacturers and chipset makers alike voiced their discontent with this and developed their own standards. They will be testing solutions from Qualcomm, Oppo, Samsung and Intel (the last two seem to use Qualcomm’s tech). We also have two iPhones in the mix even though Apple doesn’t have an official fast charge solution.

There’s a mutual standard too - while USB 3.0 couldn’t take hold on mobiles, the USB Type-C connector might prove rather successful. Reversible and adequate to carry more power – up to 3A at 5V for 15W total, it looks to have what it takes. It is still somehow larger than 2.0 connectors though, so we’ll see if it will play nice with the ongoing struggle to make smartphones as slim as possible. This equals the power from the Quick Charge 2.0 standard, though the latest USB standard also has an elective power delivery profile that can push up to 100W. This provision is particularly intended for laptops and monitors, however, the profile also has a number of lower steps that may one day land on phones and tablets.

As these charging standards perform best when the battery is close to empty, they were particularly tested with a fully drained battery and recorded the charge every five minutes. The phones were off initially and were later powered on after the first five minutes.