Chargers for mobile devices – a vast topic. Some people choose them consciously to achieve the most efficient charging and utilize the device’s capabilities 100%, but the vast majority use chargers included in the device package or, when it stops working, buy the cheapest option. This is mostly due to a lack of knowledge about the capabilities of their smartphone or a lack of market awareness when it comes to chargers. This is disadvantageous because choosing a charger without any theoretical preparation can not only slow down the charging speed of our battery but also unknowingly harm our device or even cause a fire.
Phone charger. As the name suggests, the task of this type of accessory is to charge our smartphone. Although over time, batteries in devices have larger capacities and are more solidly built, we use chargers much more frequently than we did about 10 years ago. This is because we now use smartphones almost non-stop compared to typical phones with a keyboard or monochrome display. They also have stronger components that require more energy – here, it’s mainly worth highlighting the power consumption by the large screens currently installed in such devices. Interestingly, manufacturers often do not include chargers with phones that maximize the current and charging time of devices. So how do you choose a charger for your device to minimize battery filling time? What are our options?
Let’s start with the most important issue – safety. Each branded and solid charger has a range of protections designed to protect us from unwanted side effects. These include protections against too high a temperature of the charger, short circuits, too high voltage, and the like. In cheap chargers, such protections are either not found or, due to low production costs, may be damaged. Having this kind of protection is crucial because its absence can lead to smartphone damage, and in the worst case, even electric shock or fire.
Fast charging technologies:
These include technologies such as Quick Charge, Dash Charge, Supercharge, and probably hundreds of others – depending on the manufacturer. We will describe the principle of operation on the above-mentioned ones to present the main differences.
Quick Charge is a technology developed by Qualcomm. It is definitely the most widespread type of charging, but it only works with Qualcomm brand processors. The original version of Quick Charge supported a maximum charging current of only 2 A and a voltage of 5V, which gave us a charging power of 10W. At the time, this was not a groundbreaking achievement, so it went unnoticed. Then came Quick Charge 2.0, which can use voltages of 5V, 9V, and 12V, and currents of 1.67A, 2 A, or 3A. This means that the maximum charging power is 18W. However, it still wasn’t what users were eagerly waiting for. Only Quick Charge 3.0 gained market approval and became the most popular version of fast charging from Qualcomm. It supports voltages from 3.3V to 20V and currents of 2.6A or 4.6A. To better illustrate this, I’ll give an example. A smartphone with a battery capacity of 2750 mAh charges from 0 to 80% in 35 minutes. A regular 5W charger will charge the same device to only twelve percent of battery capacity in the same time.
Dash Charge (from Oppo/OnePlus) and Supercharge (Huawei) work on the same principle with one fundamental difference. The manufacturers of this type of charging focused on increasing the current instead of the voltage. These types of charging technologies output current at a typical USB voltage of 5V but have a significantly higher current.
Interestingly, the requirements set by Quick Charge are significantly lower than those of Dash Charge or Supercharge. However, this does not mean that it will work with just any cable that fits our smartphone. Fast charging technologies can fail even if the cable is too long or too thin. It is also not very advantageous that if you have a device with, for example, Supercharge technology, you will only charge it (with fast charging) using a charger compatible with Supercharge technology, connected to a cable compatible with Supercharge technology, which puts us in a position from a few years ago where each device had a different charger input, and finding the right cable was not as simple and obvious as it is today.
However, it’s not just about cables, and recently the possibility of inductive charging of mobile devices has become very widespread on the market. They have several advantages and some disadvantages. An advantage can be considered the lack of cables that we need to connect to the device. It is charged through a receiving coil (usually located in the “back” of the device) brought close to the transmitting coil (a spirally wound wire around which an electromagnetic field is created). It is also an extremely convenient option because you just need to place the device on the inductive charger, and the battery charging process starts immediately. This solution is also supported by the small size of the charger and the fact that it is usually universal. This means that you can charge devices with a microUSB, Type-C, and Lightning connector on it – because in practice, there might not even be a socket – we only need a power receiver. Of course, inductive chargers are not free from drawbacks. Usually, the charging time is extended due to energy losses that occur during the process of converting electric current into an electromagnetic field. And not all devices are equipped with coils that allow wireless charging.
As you can see, there are many things we should pay attention to when choosing a charger. The most important thing is that such a charger is not a potential threat to the device we own or our health or life and that it is compatible with the fast charging technology that our device is equipped with. And this is what we should primarily be guided by when choosing a charger for our smartphone! I hope the above article will help you make an informed choice of the right charger, tailored to the needs of the user and the device.
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