Xiaomi has made a 100-watt charger that can charge your smartphone in just 17 minutes. Here's how it works
The trend for new top-of-the-line 2019 smartphones is to integrate increasingly large batteries, in the 3,500-4,000 mAh range, to ensure a battery life of at least a day even with screens of six inches and more.
But charging such large batteries takes time, a lot of time. That's why electronic device manufacturers are also turning to new super-fast chargers that can recharge large batteries in just a few minutes. The latest charger from Xiaomi has an outstanding performance: A 4.000 mAh battery is 100% recharged from zero charge in just 17 minutes.
How the Xiaomi charger works
The secret of this charger is its power: 100 Watts, definitely much more than the 50 Watt charger that comes with the new Huawei Mate X foldable smartphone and exactly twice as fast as the 50 Watt SuperVOOC Charger from Oppo. Samsung and OnePlus, whose chargers have a power of 15 and 30 Watts respectively, are far behind. Xiaomi's new ultra-fast charger has been announced in a video by company boss Lin Bin. In the video you can see that it is significantly faster to charge a 4,000mAh battery than Oppo's 50W charger, which takes longer to charge a 3,700mAh battery. This new Xiaomi charger will soon hit the mass market, as also confirmed by Lu Weibing who leads the Redmi brand, Xiaomi's low-cost division.
But not all smartphones will be able to take advantage of it 100%, because the actual amount of power that goes into a cell phone's battery under charge depends on many factors and is always regulated by the device, not the charger. For example, it is well known that if the smartphone and charger are the same, charging is faster if the cell phone is charged when it is switched off. This is because when all the electronics in the device are off except for the one that manages the charging, it is possible to pass more energy through without risking that some chips get damaged. If we look at Oppo's SuperVOOC charger, then only a few of the company's smartphones are compatible with such a charger: R17 Pro, Find X and Find X Automobili Lamborghini Edition. Xiaomi, on the other hand, has not yet disclosed which of its phones will be compatible with the 100-watt ultrafast charger.