Have a smartphone with a battery that’s nearly out of juice? Once upon a time you probably would have had to plug your phone in for a few hours to go from 0 to 100 percent capacity. These days many smartphones have one form of fast charging or another which can dramatically reduce the time it takes to charge a battery.
But Chinese smartphone maker Meizu’s new solution might be the fastest yet.
It’s called Super mCharge, and Meizu says the system can fully charge a 3,000 mAh battery in just 20 minutes.
How much faster is that than the competition? The best comparison I could find is Qualcomm’s claim that its new Quick Charge 4 tech can take a 2,750 mAh battery from 0 to 50 percent in 15 minutes.
So how does Meizu’s system work? By providing an 11v/5A current for up to 55 watts of power delivery. Theoretically Qualcomm’s Quick Charge supports up to 60W, but I’m not aware of any phones that can actually support that much.
That’s where Meizu might have an advantage: the company makes its own smartphones, so you can expect to see Super mCharge baked into upcoming Meizu handsets, and it’s likely that they’ll be able to take full advantage of the new fast charging system’s capabilities.
via TechRadar and @FlymeGlobal
Yet another non-standard. Why can’t they just use USB-PD like a good company? It can provide up to 100W of power (more if you build both sides yourself and use super high quality cabling which Meizu likely is anyway).
They don’t use USB-PD, as it does not allow small changes to the output voltage or current limit features built into the wall adapter. Quick Charge, Pump Express Plus, Supercharge, Turbopower all allow the phone to negotiate a specific voltage from the adapter that will reduce the battery charging in-efficiency (heat). Some of these protocols will ask for exactly twice the voltage needed, and then cut that in half inside the phone… this will allow for half the current to flow through the charging cable (allows for a less expensive, or generic type-c cable to be used).
USB-PD is fine for laptops, but really-really sucks for phones and tablets. They are about 2 generations behind the present protocols.
Please go and read the spec. It’s long, but it’s not too hard to pick out the important bits. As per section 6.4.1.2.3, voltage and current are both modifiable in 50mV or 10mA increments for fixed supply sources. There is also a variable supply source definition a little bit below that allows setting of a minimum and maximum voltage in 50mV increments which lets the end device get exactly what it needs.
I stand corrected. I do see the 50mV steps in the Revision 3.0 Version 1.1 released on Jan 12, 2017. I have been using my Tronsmart Quick Charge 3.0 adapter since I bought it on Amazon in Dec 2015. It does 100mV steps. I use my Drok usb voltage meter to check the adapter voltage, and I can see it using many of the different steps. Do you know of any Amazon PD adapters that have any other voltage than 5, 9, 15 and 20V? I have not seen any. I heard that the latest Google Pixel phones only use 5V and never request any voltage change.