Almost every tech company is struggling to improve fast charging. This system allows a mobile to pass from 0% battery to 100% in less than 45 minutesYes, at best. But fast charging has a hidden danger. One that can destroy your brand new mobile that has cost you more than 1,000 euros.
A conventional charger has a power of 5 to 10 watts. A faster charger can improve that up to eight times. For instance, The iPhone 11 Pro and Pro Max come with an 18-watt fast charger, the Galaxy Note 10 and Note 10 Plus have 25-watt chargers in their boxes. Shortly the Quick Charge 5.0 from Qualcomm will offer charges of up to 100 watts, a true outrage that until now was only present in desktop computers.
Manufacturers are constantly investing money in their research and development teams for faster and faster charging times, and for this they use different systems. Xiaomi has been the last company to put on the table a new 120W fast charging system of its Xiaomi Mi 10 Ultra (and announced a 200W system that has not yet set foot on the market.
Are these charging systems safe? Does it affect the useful life of our mobiles? Fast charging has only one danger. The great enemy of cell phone batteries, which are currently Li-Ion or lithium-ion batteries, is heat. Heat is the true nemesis of batteries and a more formidable enemy even than charge cycles, which is what the useful life of smartphones is usually measured by.
When the temperature of the batteries rises higher than recommended, batteries suffer a higher wear than normal since heat has a direct impact on their performance. And if charging a battery in a normal way already causes its temperature to rise (albeit in a controlled way), fast charging makes the temperature even higher. Hence, manufacturers are investigating systems to deliver more power without raising temperatures, and we even find wireless chargers with built-in cooling.
That is why experts usually recommend that we use fast charging only when it is absolutely essential, for example when we make short stops and we need to regain the autonomy of the phone as soon as possible. If our pace of life makes us charge the phone on the bedside throughout the night, it is recommended that we get slow chargers that deliver 5W or less. The phone will be able to charge for hours with minimal temperature rise, thus preserving the durability of its battery.
This is one of the reasons why Apple, a leading company in the world of smartphones -not in sales, but in revenue- just allow the iPhone 13 to charge at a maximum power of 20 watts, a ridiculous figure if we compare it with the 120 watts of Xiaomi. However, the apple phones tend to last longer – and in better condition – than those of the Chinese company.
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