There’s a limit to how big a battery you can stuff in a smartphone, so companies have been focusing on two ways to let you spend less time charging your phone: making their devices more efficient and making the charging process faster.
Huawei has announced a major breakthrough on the latter front: the company says its new batteries can be charged 10 times more quickly than existing batteries, and can reach a 50 percent charge in just a few minutes.
Huawei’s Watt Lab division is showing off the new technology at the Battery Symposium in Japan this week. The team has two battery demos:
- A 3,000 mAh battery that can be charged to 48 percent capacity in 5 minutes
- A 600 mAh battery that fills up to 68 percent from a 2-minute charging session
If these batteries come to market, you might be able to get 10 hours of talk time from a smartphone just by plugging it into a charger for 5 minutes. While that might not be quite as appealing as being able to run for days at a time between charges, it’s probably the next best thing since it means you may be able to top off your battery when you’re on the go in less time than it takes to drink a cup of coffee.
This isn’t the only fast charging technology around. Many phones with Qualcomm chips can take advantage of that company’s Quick Charge 2.0 or Quick Charge 3.0 technology for rapid charging, and phones that have USB Type-C connectors like the Nexus 5X and Nexus 6P can draw power more quickly than phones with standard micro USB connectors as well.
But Huawei’s system seems to be the fastest around. Unfortunately there’s no word on if or when these new batteries of Huawei’s will show up in phones, tablets, or other devices.
For now, Huawei’s demo videos show the batteries being removed from a phone and placed in a special charger — so it’s not even clear if you can charge the batteries that quickly while they’re in a mobile device.
via Android Police
and drains in minutes. or explode in minutes
Would be nice to know what this fast-charging capability does to the cycle life of the battery because there is a glaring omission of that in the article.
If a typical, 500-cycle li-ion battery goes down to 100 cycles due to this, than I think I will keep my slow-charging one thanks.
There is never a limit it actually needs to be thin and pretty. I don’t
mind a phone that got 2x the thickness and gives double the battery
life, its just never been offered before. Have seen it on a Samsung
phone before that comes with a custom back only not sure if that is all
true with those Chinese battery’s. All i wanted to say is the phone
company’s don’t give us a choice
I had a Xiaomi Mi2 for 3 years. It had an interchangeable back and the original 2000 mAh battery could be replaced with a 3000 mAh one. Main reason I choose that phone at that time.
18w adapters do a very good job at getting a ~40% charge in 15min. I looked at the Galaxy s6 last week and the Maxim master charger was thermal throttling at 16w at about 90% efficiency at 9v. If they used a slave charger or increased their master efficiency to mid 90s they could easily max out the wall adapter and get to 45% in 15min on the 2500mAh battery.
My point is that if Huawei wants to do 45% in 5min they will need a wall adapter that can do 3 x 18w = 54w. USB PD has a 60w profile of 3A @20V, which is meant for laptops. I believe the 2015 chromebook pixel uses that exact profile.
If Huawei’s battery goes mainstream, companies who make high efficiency chargers could make a lot of money. That’s me.