Breakthrough fast charging juices up dead phone in 9 minutes

Oppo has shown it can fully charge a 4,500mAh phone battery in nine minutes — the latest achievement in an ongoing contest for fast charging supremacy. The Chinese phone company showed off its 240W Supervooc flash charge technology in a YouTube video and at its MWC 2022 booth, which they say has “record-breaking, industry-leading speed.”

The recorded data comes from Oppo’s lab testing environment and is easily one of the fastest charge times, despite being only a concept for the moment.

Many safety measures — According to Oppo, the 240W Supervooc flash charge uses 24V/10A over the USB-C interface. The proprietary charging technology uses three charge pumps and the power can be converted to 10V/24A, allowing its test smartphone to hit 50 percent charge in three and a half minutes. It definitely sounds like a concerning amount of power to be pumped into your smartphone in such a short amount of time, but Oppo said they took a holistic approach when thinking about battery safety.

To ensure that their latest fast charge technology wasn’t dangerous, Oppo specifically incorporated certain elements into the adapter, charging cable and device. According to Oppo, there’s a custom chip that controls the voltage, current and temperature and a battery safety chip that monitors if there’s been any external damage to the battery itself. Oppo also installed 13 temperature sensors into the phone, to reduce the risk of overheating.

Oppo didn’t offer any details on when its latest fast charging breakthrough would be available, but it doesn’t seem likely it’ll be available for its latest flagship phone, the Find X5 Pro, which was just released.

Race for the fastest charge — Not just with Oppo, fast charging has been a major recurring theme at MWC 2022. Oppo themselves had also released its slower 150W Supervooc flash charge technology that instead focuses on maintaining battery health.

Honor debuted its latest flagship smartphone, the Magic 4 Pro, at MWC 2022 that can be wirelessly charged at 100W for a 0 to 50 percent charge in 15 minutes. RealMe also jumped into the arena, revealing its UltraDart charging system that enables charging speeds between 100W and 200W and will be included with its just-announced GT Neo 3 that can hit 50 percent charge in five minutes at 150W.