Qualcomm’s Quick Charge has been a Godsend for many mobile users of late, offering faster battery charging than normal adapters and enabling for longer hours of use. And after much anticipation, the company is now releasing the next iteration of their Quick Charge technology in smartphones in the middle of this year.
The new technology will be dubbed Quick Charge 4 and has been termed as being the fastest smartphone battery charging tech to date. In less than 15 minutes, a smartphone can be charged up to 50 percent with a charger that sports Quick Charge 4. Qualcomm claims that it is the equivalent of five hours of talk time in just five minutes. Quick Charge 4 is 20 percent faster than its predecessor, which is not a very big margin, so current users of the Quick Charge 3 tech will be pleased to know that they won’t really be missing out on the two or three minutes it might take them longer. These statistics came about from testing the charging capabilities of a 2,750mAh battery. How it will compare to batteries of larger capacities above 3000mAh is yet to be seen however.
PC World indicates that Quick Charge 4 will work on the new standard USB Type-C, which is known to deliver more power to devices, enabling them to charge quicker. The tech was launched during the release of the Snapdragon 835, but some phones like the Xperia XZ Premium only came with the Quick Charge 3. Even the Galaxy S8 has only proprietary wired and wireless charging solutions. Qualcomm has not yet divulged information about the list of devices which will be releasing with the new Quick Charge 4. Hopefully, the new OnePlus 5 should bear a semblance of the technology, as the company is known for its Dash charging.
Considering that nowadays most users prefer carrying a power bank with them everywhere they go, it would make sense for Qualcomm to release a power-bank compatible chip with Quick Charge 4 so that users can still charge their phones faster through the power bank. Of course, since Quick Charge 4 is an internal specification of the phone, there are certain software tweaks that have also been made to optimize the charging potential of the device. Qualcomm have shipped over 600 million smartphones with Quick Charge 2 and 3 technologies.
We are expecting the usual suspects to adopt the new charging standard such as LG, HTC, Sony and Samsung, among others. It would be safe to say that many new phones releasing during the second half of the year will come with Quick Charge 4.
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