Cellphone chargers, they're all basically the same right? You plug it into the wall, you throw a usb cable on it,
then you plug it into the lightning or micro usb or whatever other connector
there is on your phone and call it a day... Or
night. If you charge your devices at night. Which would make sense because, well look, never mind that, the point is: Easy, right? WRONG! And
you know what else is wrong? Teasing upcoming videos like part five of whole room water cooling when realistically
they're at least two weeks out and yet I'd do it anyway
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So four years ago life was relatively simple at least as far as
five volt chargers for phones and tablets when you had your usb ports on your computer or
very low end wall ports that output 500 milliamps the
typical ones and the ones bundled with your phones which are usually one amp ish, and
Premium aftermarket ones and the bundled ones of tablets which were usually
2 or 2.1 amps now even in those days though you sometimes needed
interoperability between your charger and the device being charged in order to take advantage of the best possible charging rates because
beefier componentry is required to prevent the device and/or its battery from being damaged by the charging process.
So phone manufacturers like apple and Samsung
used little signalling tricks that would allow their chargers to communicate with their devices to let them know "hey
It's ok to draw more power". Fast forward to 2012 and the introduction of qualcomm quick charge
1.0 an attempt to standardize
faster charging so more customers could leverage it. At least those customers whose phones contain qualcomm processors. Version 1.0
was all about optimizing charge times with 5 volt 2 amp adapters that you already own with a fancy power management IC (Integrated Circuit)
built into the device itself. All the user needed to know was that his or her gadget was charging faster,
especially when it was very low. Version 2.0,
which started showing up in devices like the HTC one M8 in early 2014.
Takes the on-device hardware a step further and allows it to accept up to three
amps from a five volt power supply and even other voltages as well up to twelve (whoops) volts.
But the tricky thing is that while both the
devices and the chargers are backwards compatible with older lower power ones, to take full advantage of quick charge 2.0,
we need drastically different power sources that can deliver the aforementioned greater current and varying voltages.
So, if you want to be sure it supports quick charge 2.0 check the box.
It'll say quick charge 2.0
and it'll come with a pretty steep price tag for the up for a freaking wall port. So the question
then is, is it worth the investment?
Well, Qualcomm claims that compared to conventional charging so 5 volt 1 amp, quick charge 2.0
can fill your battery up to 5 times more in the same time and even compared to quick charge 1.0
it's twice as fast. But their results, while surely very scientific,
were done on a bare battery, as far as I can tell and their form might not really reflect exactly the results
we'll see in the real world. So I brought this test to the real world suckas!
I used a nexus 6 from Google, manufactured by motorola, and tested it in four different scenarios.
First with an Apple 1 amp charger that I've had since I got my iPhone 4.
Second with a 2 amp wall wart that I got with the Samsung [Galaxy] tab 10.1.
Third with the quick charge 2.0 charger included in the nexus 6's box.
And finally with a third-Party,
Quick charge 2.0 charger, from Pure gear. To see if the rated current at the various charging voltages makes a difference on this device.
Anyway, since they're actually a touch lower than motorola's bundled turbo charger.
Maybe that contributes to pure gears smaller size as well actually. Now before beginning, I needed a testing methodology.
Obviously, I couldn't just power down the phone and plug it in and stare at it until it was finished.
So here's what I did.
I ran a 3D game with the flashlight on to drain the battery until the phone powered off.
Then I plugged it in briefly powered it back on and let it sit at the home screen until it reached
3% (any lower and it would shut down again).
I put it in airplane mode and closed all apps except for battery monitor
widget, which I configured to pull the battery level once every minute because a big part of the benefit of quick charge is not
necessarily the overall charge time to 100% but rather the charge time to go from empty to a
Reasonable level when you're desperate and we need more plot points than just start and end in order to get that. So to ensure
we were getting the best possible experience a
one-foot
micro-B Usb cable was used since the cable length can have an impact on charging power. And [emphasized]
I ended up with the graph that you see here. Each charge test was run twice to ensure that nothing weird happened.
So I consider these results accurate to within plus or minus a few percent and overall I learned a few things.
Number one, quick charge 2.0 is faster than other solutions. Number two, most 2 amp chargers out there,
you can see I have quite a few of them here, are either incapable of handshaking with many devices and
enabling faster charging rates or
they just plain suck. Most of them topped out around 1.5. Amps.
Number three, all the 1 Amp chargers
I have lying around, deliver more than one amp, including the apple one that I used for my
benchmarks which was the closest to one amp out of the bunch. Number four, thanks to qualcomm standardizing this stuff a
Third-Party quick charge 2.0 charger, will deliver basically the same results as a first party one.
Something that hasn't always been the case in the past with proprietary standards.
So cool beans, faster charging is good right?! I mean, it's not quite as fast as I was hoping but it's definitely faster.
Actually, not always. It's great if your phone is almost dead
and you've got a blind date in half an hour
and you need to make sure you can you know, text your friends from the dinner table if it's not going well,
Or if it is going well "oh, he's so wonderful". [Feminine Voice]
But juicing up your battery with a higher current charger generates more heat,
which can negatively impact the battery's overall lifespan. How many
charge and discharge cycles it can handle. Given that so many batteries are non replaceable these days,
this is a bit of a concern. So, whenever you're plugging in for the night, even though you have support for quick charge 2.0,
I'd recommend sticking with a low speed charger.
So thanks for watching guys, like this video if you liked it, dislike it if you thought it sucked, leave a comment if your feelings
were more complicated in this. Let me know, what were you expecting out of all of this?
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