Ever since OPPO announced the first ever
VOOC charging for many years ago, every single smartphone
brand - except for a few - actually has been pushing superfast charging
standards and speeds as a selling point of their brand new smartphones.
As time goes by, though, the marketing for this
superfast charging speeds starts to get a little bit muddy.
So I'm here to try to set the record straight.
So let's begin
So before we begin, I have a few disclaimers first.
Number one, I'm not an expert in battiers.
I do have a degree in electronics majoring in nanotechnology,
but batteries are totally out of my scope.
I cannot comment on lithium ion batteries and their compatibility
with these kind of high wattage chargers.
And number two, I won't comment on the long term effects
of charging in a video like this because there's just way
too many factors to consider when it comes to batteries health.
And what I can comment, though, is that throughout the years
that we've been testing phones and they've been upping their charging
speed from the humble 5W to 10W and then Qualcomm QuickCharge
3.0 came by, which is 18W, and then everything went haywire.
We now have a lot of different wattages, up to a total of 120W
that is available in the market right now from Xiaomi.
There are many other companies showing what they just
higher than 120W for their phones but we won't talk about them here today
because it is still not available in the market yet
as in not available commercially for you to buy and test it out.
And I also won't talk about why OPPO's 33W VOOC charger doesn't work
we've Xiaomi's 33W phones because that is due to proprietary
charging standards and it is a rather extensive topic on its own.
And we've also talked about it in the previous video.
So check it out at the top right corner there, which I highly recommend you
to watch that before proceeding to watch this video.
With that said, this entire video will be based on my personal experience
reviewing a lot of different smartphones from many different brands
throughout the years.
So when we do our battery charging tests on every phone,
we log the battery percentage in terms of every single minute.
So in short, we drain the battery to about 12% through various different means.
Maybe we just leave Genshin Impact turned on.
Maybe we do some random battery burning app, leave it in the background
and bring it down to about 10% to 12%.
Let it cool down first because heat can affect the charging speed
and then we only initiate the charging test from there.
And then after we gather all of the data, we put all of that data
into a Google Sheet to generate the graph for you to see.
Like for example, right here, since everything is in Google Sheet,
would you want us to put everything up
for you to see for yourself through our Google Sheet?
Should we do that?
So what we
do is to create another copy of what we have currently
and make it public for you guys to have a look.
It will only be consisting from phones up to late
2019 if I'm not wrong, because that is when we move from Excel to Google Sheet.
So Link is down in the description below for you to check it out.
And after all that I've mentioned in our YouTube community, post
that I am going to explain why I think fast charging is mostly irrelevant
and why it has a lot of fake marketing in the whole advertisement
So let's talk about the fake marketing first.
I guess fake is not really accurate here.
It's more like crucial technical details that are not included
or at least publicly available for you to see.
And those details are very important.
So let me give you a perfect example right here.
As fast charging speeds go even faster, though, wattages don't really matter much.
The number of battery cells matter more.
So in the recent review of the Xiaomi 12 Pro that has a 120W charger in the box,
I realized that they didn't mention the number of battery cells at all.
Since I got the Xiaomi 12 Pro with me, I decided to dive deeper
into the charging test and dig out all of the tiny little details that I can find.
And when I took the wattmeter and recorded the readings,
even though the charger says it's 120W and the phone is marketed to accept 120W,
the wattmeter reported only and about 113W at its peak
and yet it averages at about 110 watts for most of the time.
Then when the phone charge a little bit more it dropped to about 60W
to 70W average before tapering off to about 1W and then the charging
is complete in comparison the Black Shark 4 Pro has the true 120W charging
because our wattmeter did catch it recording and 120W.
That is because the Black Shark 4 Pro uses a dual cell battery
and it even has a larger battery capacity compared to the Xiaomi 12 Pro and yet
with that dual-cell battery it can charge faster than the Xiaomi 12 Pro.
So what I'm trying to say here is that Xiaomi didn't disclose the number
of battery cells in their marketing
and it just states 120W, there you go but in truth
the true 120W is actually you're going to need those are battery.
Yeah single cell battery
even though Xiaomi says they have something called multiple tap winding
which is essentially mimicking dual-cell batteries by just
I don't know how to explain this, it's like a battery cell and then usually it's
like two terminals, one going in and out but multiple tap winding is like multiple
pathways of the charge going into the battery.
So it essentially creates like
multiple lane highways compared to a single lane highway.
More like that.
But it will still not be as fast as a true dual-cell battery.
Hello Future Me here.
Since we recorded this video originally, a few weeks have passed
and we also reviewed a few more phones, one of it being the new
Redmi Note 11 Pro Plus 5G.
And that phone is a really interesting one because it also comes
with a 120W charger inside the box just like the Xiaomi 12 Pro.
But this phone comes with a dual-cell battery and multiple
tap winding at the same time that means the Redmi Note 11
Pro Plus 5G is literally having a much faster
charging speed than the flagship Xiaomi 12 Pro which I don't know why
but our charging test also proves that this is indeed the fact as well.
And then secondly what we want to see is that increasing
the wattage doesn't actually increase the charging speed linearly.
So this is also yet another technical thing that is difficult to explain.
A few years ago we did do an article showing that the battery percentage
increment is not really linear by charging.
So the lower wattage charges, like 5W chargers are much more linear
compared to a 10W charger.
And then as the what they just go higher, the more extreme the curvature gets.
Usually, these fast chargers work in tiers as well.
So different tiers will push out a different wattage.
Let's say, for example, the Xiaomi 12 Pro, we can see that in tier one,
which is the lower battery percentages, it will charge at a much more
higher wattage, which is why you can see that the graph line is a lot more steeper
and then when it goes up to about 35%, it starts to flatten out
a little to about 60W-70W that is tier 2
and then it will continue charging at that speed until the end.
Even the Black Shark 4 Pro has this kind of tiering system as well as you can
see it charges real quick up until 50% and then it slows down to charge until 90%
before tapering off to complete the charge at 100%.
However every smartphone brand
has its own tiering system when it comes to this charging curve
and it seems to be control by software as well.
Some companies like Samsung even gave us the option to limit
the charging speed down to 10W maximum via software.
And then when it comes to the misleading part of charging,
I can only think of one example and that is the most recent Samsung Galaxy
S22 Ultra.
You see,
they didn't advertise that the phone will go up to 45W of charging and in truth
it only takes in about 28W as shown by other YouTube videos.
And I do think that someone can push out a firmware update to unlock it to
45W maximum but whether they want to do it or not, it's up to them.
I'm sure that Samsung's reason to do this is because of battery protection.
But if we users want to damage our phone's battery,
then just let us do it.
And lastly, why fast charging doesn't matter.
For me personally, I just manage how I use my smartphone
despite the misleading, fast charging wattage on the Samsung Galaxy S22 Ultra.
I'm using this by the way, and I'm still loving this phone
and I still charge it overnight.
Using a 10W charger, knowing that I'll wake up with 100%
charge and go on about with my day.
I believe that a smartphone like this with a 5,000mAh battery can last me
throughout one full day of use with about 30% left and about 1 a.m.
or something like that and if somehow I managed to drain
the battery lower than 30% at like 4 p.m.
or something like that, that means on that day I've been using my smartphone
way too much and I need to stop so I don't get smartphone addiction.
And that is
also a very serious problem on its own, which we don't want to talk about here.
I don't play games on my phone and my phone usage
behaviour is pretty predictable anyway, but that is how I use my smartphone
and that will definitely differ from how you use your smartphone too.
So yeah, that's it.
That's my opinion.
When it comes to fast charging and all of its misleading marketing and whatnot,
a lot of the crucial details are really hidden
in the technical details that they don't publicly disclose.
And we reviewers have to dig all of those information out
to show it to you why those things are happening.
So I hope
this video has been insightful for you and I hope you learn something as well.
So yeah, I'll see you guys in the next video.