It seems very unlikely smartphone manufacturers will start making thicker phones again, and battery technology moves at a snail’s pace, so in order to make our phones work for longer, faster charging seems to be the focus. Xiaomi’s latest effort resets the bar for how fast a battery can be fully recharged.
Xiaomi wants the world to know it can not only sell out of new phones within 20 minutes but it can also fully charge the power-hungry devices in the same amount of time.
Lu Weibing, the chief of Xiaomi’s sub-brand Redmi, took the wraps off Xiaomi’s Super Charge Turbo technology in a demo video posted to Chinese social network Weibo.
A phone charging isn’t exactly enthralling footage but the 39-second time-lapse video does offer the exciting prospect of waiting just 17 minutes to fully charge a phone.
In this case, Xiaomi charged a 4,000mAh battery in 17 minutes, outpacing rival Oppo’s SuperVOOC fast-charging tech on a phone with a 3,700mAh battery, which only charged to 65 percent in that time.
The key difference in charge times is due to Xiaomi’s use of 100W technology compared with Oppo’s still impressive 50W charger.
It looks like Xiaomi could take a leaf out of Samsung’s current playbook of bringing new features to cheaper phones before Galaxy X flagships in a bid to win over consumers at a time when replacement cycles are decelerating.
According to Gizmochina, Lu revealed that Redmi phones will be the first to benefit from Xiaomi’s Super Charge Turbo battery tech, however he didn’t offer a timeline for their availability. The fast-charging tech could arrive in the company’s forthcoming phone running on a Snapdragon 855. On the other hand, it would be rare for such technology to arrive in cheaper phones first.
The Redmi sub-brand’s origins are at the lower end, such as the new Redmi 7, a smartphone that launched this month and costs just $105. The entry-level model offers a 6.26-inch screen, 2GB of RAM and 16GB of storage on a Snapdragon 632.
