Gone are those days when Apple and Samsung were considered the source of innovations. Though these two are the world’s leading smartphone industry companies, we haven’t seen mind-blowing innovations from them for a decade or so. If you disagree with us saying Dynamic Island on the iPhone 14 is a true innovation, please look at what the Chinese companies do. For instance, do you know the highest charging speed of the current Samsung Galaxy S series of flagship phones? If not, only the Ultra version supports 45W fast charging, while the other models in the series do only 25W. As for the iPhone 14 models, they support just 25W/27W charging.
The World’s Fastest Charging Phones
You might think these are quite satisfactory. But the thing is that a few Chinese smartphone makers have already crossed the mark of 200W. The Red Magic 7 Pro boasted a 165W fast charging speed not long ago. But recently, Xiaomi and VIVO released their new smartphones with 210W and 200W charging speeds. And we are not talking about the other companies, such as OPPO, which exceeded 150W, and Huawei and Honor, which offer handsets with 100W fast charging.
We understand that the maximum charging speed doesn’t equal the charging time. There are various factors affecting the overall process. This might refer to the charging port, charger, charging cable, remaining power, etc. But on the other hand, this is a simple indicator showing the charging specification of a concrete model. For instance, the Redmi Note 12 Pro supports 210W charging, which allows the phone to charge from 0 to 100% in 9 minutes only. This is the world’s fastest charging phone that does the process in a single-digit time. The iQOO 10 Pro supports 200W charging, which fills the battery in 10 minutes.
Well, these are the fastest charging smartphones on the globe. But what about the rest?
There are many fast charging protocols in the industry. The coexistence of various complicated charging protocols is already the current status quo. Everyone relies on the USB-C interface, but it is not universal. Apple and many Android manufacturers have further exacerbated the gap between various private charging protocols for their interests.
Any company that wants to patent a fast charging technology should get various certifications. Moreover, it brings its own high requirements of fast charging for charging equipment. This limits the versatility of peripherals. We mean that there might be cases when the phone supports a high charging speed, it might be unable to leverage the technology because the charging cable doesn’t have a corresponding transmission speed, the charging head doesn’t support it, etc.
New Universal Charging Protocol
However, the good news is that recently, we saw the first batch of smartphones, power adapters, and power banks using the UFCS-integrated fast charging protocol. They include many smartphones and accessories from manufacturers such as Huawei, Xiaomi, VIVO, and OPPO.
The UFCS protocol in the early stage supports the UFCS 1.0 fusion fast-charging protocol of 40W. The follow-up UFCS protocol will continue to improve the standard versatility between brands. The target of the second stage is 65W.
On the basis of the universal fast charging protocol, it is more reasonable for manufacturers to release various flagship smartphones that support fast charging without a charger in the package. Thus, they will be only busy with making good phones, while the task of fast charging will be delegated to charger makers.
