The fast charging smartphone wars have been raging for several years, and now another company has yet again upped its game.
Infinix, the Chinese smartphone maker, has announced 260W wired charging and 110W wireless charging.
The company says the 260W technology can charge a phone with a 4400mAh battery from 1- to 100% in 7.5 minutes. It has previously shown off 160W and 180W solutions.
“The charging architecture uses a 4-Pump Intelligent Circuit Design that intelligently identifies power requirements and allocates the number of charge pumps needed to work,” Infinix said.
“The upgraded 12C high rate 4400mAh battery [has] a multi-electrode lug structure, which ensures a high charging conversion efficiency of up to 98.5%, while also increasing battery durability,”
It also claimed the battery can retain more than 90% of its energy after 1000 cycles.
The same 260W tech would be able to charge that theoretical phone to 25% in one minute. Check out the demo in the video below:
260W is technically faster than the 240W wired charging just announced on the Realme GT3, which is the fastest charging phone that you’ll soon be able to buy. Realme claims the 4600mAh battery can go from flat to full in nine minutes.
That means if Infinix’s battery was the same size, the extra 20W is saving you 90 seconds of waiting time for that full top up.
Xiaomi recently showed off 300W wired charging that it said can fully charge a smaller 4100mAh battery in four minutes and 54 seconds.
It’s all getting a bit crazy given it still takes me the best part of an hour to fully charge my Google Pixel 7 Pro at its 30W speed. It seems ridiculously slow in comparison, as are the latest iPhones.
If it’s wireless charging you prefer then Infinix also showed off 110W wireless charging that can charge a phone, presumably of the same mystery capacity, in 16 minutes. Here’s the short demo video:
That’s impressively fast for wireless charging, which generates more heat than wired does. That’s why Infinix’s wireless charger has a fan stuffed inside to cool everything down. Oppo and OnePlus have released similar chargers for their phones, but the charging speeds were well below 110W.
Though concerns remain in the phone industry that very fast charging is dangerous and could cause failed, exploding batteries, there have been no widely reported issues with any one specific phone model since Samsung’s 2017 Note 7 debacle.
I asked Infinix if both its wired and wireless charging technology could conceivably be present in the same phone, because many of the fastest charging phones don’t support wireless – the 240W Realme GT3 and 150W OnePlus 10T as prime examples.
“The All-Round FastCharge solution will be first featured on the Infinix NOTE series later this year,” a spokesperson said.
“Infinix has not confirmed at this moment whether the 260W All-Round FastCharge and 110W wireless All-Round FastCharge will be equipped in any specific model.”
So it’s unclear if we will see the tech in one or several devices.
While many smartphones now come with very fast charging, Apple and Samsung are holdouts.
The iPhone 14 Pro can only charge at a maximum speed of 27W, while the Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra can hit 45W. Neither of these phones comes with a charger in the box – but companies that offer very fast wired charging as a reason to buy the phone are all generally still including the charger in the retail packaging.
Author: Henry Burrell, Contributor, Tech Advisor
Previously Tech Advisor’s Phones Editor, Henry covers and reviews every smartphone worth knowing about. He spends a lot of time moving between different handsets and shouting at WhatsApp to support multiple devices at once.