OPPO has been bringing the heat in the charging game for the better part of a decade now, and their latest announcement at MWC 2022 in Barcelona is no less impressive than usual — a 150W charger for smartphones that, when used with a USB Type-C cable, can charge a smartphone with a 4,500 mAh battery to full in 15 minutes.
Everyone has to find their thing in the smartphone game, and it seems like battery charging is OPPO’s. They’ve been developing super speedy chargers for much of the last decade by getting into the nitty gritty of charger and battery design — this time around, they’ve used two charging pumps in the charger that can halve voltage to make sure charging can happen that fast without the risk of overheating the charger or the battery, creating a fire risk.
In fact, safety and battery health have been as important as speed for OPPO. On their latest Find X5 Pro smartphone, they introduced their Battery Health Engine, which can work with their wall chargers to ensure these kinds of breakneck charging speeds while avoiding battery degradation — a problem that, for all the advances in consumer tech we’ve seen, hasn’t really improved appreciably. The Battery Health Engine takes into account the amount of charging that needs to be done and the battery’s chemistry to optimize charging. The result is that after 1,600 charge cycles, batteries will be at 80% of their original capacity — OPPO claims this is twice the current industry standard.
While folks with OPPO devices are going to be the primary beneficiaries of this tech, they won’t necessarily be the only ones — OPPO does license out their battery tech, so it’s not impossible that we’ll see these speeds (and battery durability!) in other devices more and more. Until then, we’re just excited that someone out there is giving real though to how to make batteries last longer, because it’s the worst when you have to ditch an otherwise great device because it lasts about 30 minutes on a full charge!
