I feel something is missing at the moment with our ability to choose on the device how I want it to charge. Would be nice to plug the phone in and unless I say otherwise it does a nice slow charge even if the cable and charger is capable of more. But if I press a button on the front after I plug it in then I can select fast and it goes as quickly as the combination allows. Its irritating to have to have different chargers for this to preserve the battery.
Its pretty bad that only recent phones have started to add the ability to charge to only 80% to keep the battery in the optimal zone to extend the life given how long we have known that 80% was the optimal maximum. There are also a few phones now able to power themselves from USB without using the battery which if you leave them in chargers a lot throughout the day and night seems like a good feature to have to preserve the battery further.
Maybe all the complexity around this is too much and people just want to plug it in and quick 100% as quick as possible and will change their phone regularly but its pretty wasteful. We ended up going through lots of special chargers that all do very similar things and now you get a device and it often doesn't even come with a cable let alone a charger and you are digging through the specs of your charger, cable and device to work out if its all going to mesh correctly together or you'll be stuck on slow mode. We have ended up with so many standards for getting quicker than the basic charge its going to take a while for all these devices to age out and in the meantime chargers are going to be doing QC and PD and a host of other things besides for a while.
> Maybe all the complexity around this is too much and people just want to plug it in and quick 100% as quick as possible and will change their phone regularly
It's this, 100%. The nerds that care about charge temperature and battery degradation and proliferation of incompatible charging standards are a rounding error, most people just want to know it can charge fast in case they forget and need to leave soon.
I am happy with my Chargie [1], an interposing dongle which provides a Bluetooth receiver and app that lets you set arbitrary preferences on your phone and fast charge, slow charge, or turn off the charger at configurable state of charge setpoints or times.
It is absolutely too much work. It's incredibly easy to get bogged into the weeds of config stuff like this and almost no one will care. if they did, I bet it's turn into a cluster of hearsay about magic settings that make almost no practical difference.
Also, I'd argue it's not obvious that 80% charging is better for most people. You're taking an immediate 20% cut to battery life, and chances are it will take years for it to actually be better than charging to 100%. I guess it's good to have the option, but only if you almost never need that last bit of capacity.
I don't like the 80% option because every time I'm leaving the house for extended periods, going hiking or traveling I think "is it worth it to go through 3 settings screens to take an extra 15% charge with me?" 15% is a micro optimization and it was easier when there was no option and I never thought about it. I want to think about other things, not my phone's battery capacity.
Yeah but in android or something this would be just another "quick settings tile" like the "flashlight" or "night light" or "battery saving mode". You could call it "overcharge mode" or "extra battery mode", and like the "night light" mode it would get disabled once you reach a full charge, so you don't have to dig into settings to turn it off again.
Totally agree. Tbh I never needed the phones to become as thin as cardboard. At the cost of sacraficing the ability to easily remove/replace the battery I certainly never wanted it.
Adaptive Charging on Pixel devices gets most of the way there: it will learn how long it's typically on the charger each day, and automatically slow the rate of charge to match, so that it finishes approximately an hour before you usually unplug it.
There's a manual option to turn it off (charge at full rate this time only), but not to manually turn it on (such as giving it a target time to be fully charged). Older Pixels used what time the alarm was set as the target time to finish charging, which I preferred as someone who doesn't wake up at the same time every day; I'm not sure why they took that away.
My hack is to only use fast charging bricks, but at home I charge my phone wirelessly. So that means in practice I rarely fast charge it.
Yes, it does heat up due to energy losses, but I suspect that's way less hard on the battery than the same amount of heat from actual high current charging (please correct me if I'm wrong).
This means the only drawback is that my phone charging is cost-inefficient.
My Galaxy S21 lets me pick between normal, fast, or super-fast charging in the settings. Not quite one tap, but it does let you do it.
That said "super-fast" charging on it is like 18W and still about an hour from 20%, so it doesn't really qualify as fast charging IMO, and at an hour is certainly not going to be causing any excess battery wear. It's just normal speed.
For sure, but for terms of battery wear all that really matters is the time to charge. Under 1 hour is getting into the realm of 'really fast' and heat inside the cell starts to become an issue.
> the best solution is slow charging, for which a low-power charger from your old feature phone is ideal. These devices offer a small power output of 2–5 W, stretching the charging process to 5–7 hours depending on the adapter's power and the battery capacity. This way, your phone's battery charges under the best conditions, minimizing degradation
I've been charging my iPhone this way since the iPhone 4 (trickle charging overnight) and have noticed zero improvement in battery degradation performance vs. fast charging.
As a current example, my iPhone 15 Pro, purchased a month after launch, is at 85% capacity.
>In such a situation, the best solution is slow charging, for which a low-power charger from your old feature phone is ideal.
It seems like most Android phones now have a feature that does this, though you have to enable it. Mine asked me to put in the time I go to bed and the time I wake up, and it slowly charges the battery over that time period to 100%
My Pixel just bases this off of the morning alarm clock. Since I don't like waking to an alarm, this just means that I have a permanent silent 9am alarm.
I do hope that USB PD and (to a lesser extent) Qi takeover the charging space. There is really no reason to have every SoC vendor create their own incompatible fast charging standard.
I never even strictly enabled it, but I'm a big fan. My pixel 5 from 2020 still easily gets a full day of battery life, and without direct evidence, I suspect always slow-charging has helped with that.
Many phones/chargers with propietary protocols are also equipped with USB PD compatibility. For example, you can pick up some random Xiaomi phone labelled at 90W and expect it to charge at more than 20W with USB PD, or even ~90W on some vivo models.
I don't see why the best charger is the old feature phone's charger - the point in fast charging is that you don't have to wait too long if in a hurry. That charger is the "best" if only you have almost unlimited time to charge, like during the night.
One thing I was hoping the article would explain is how fast charging actually works: IE, how does the charge controller turn incoming electricity into a full battery?
The reason why I switched to wireless charging was because I had a phone go bad due to problems with the charge port. USB-c ports on my Pixels to tend to clog with dust and other debris, but as long as I use a wireless charger, it doesn't matter.
All charging does is reverse the flow of lithium ions through the electrolyte that happens when the battery discharges.
Wireless charging is usually worse long term because of the extra heat the coils create from the waste energy. It's probably about as bad as the really fast charging phones do now though. I principally have mine do a slow charge over night these days though as is mostly last through the day.
It's basically as simple as a buck converter that reduces the incoming voltage.
Phone batteries need either 4.2V or 4.35V to charge fully, so whatever voltage comes in (5-20V typically) at whatever current, gets reduced down to the correct voltage and current to charge the battery.
I don't think Apple was the first to use the magnets to align the phone to the charger. I think I had a nexus 5 that had the magnets in the phone and google Qi charger -- that would perfectly align the phone and charger.
Pretty sure magnet alignment was part of wireless charging with the Palm Pre, and I'm not even a Palm person (I did have an IBM branded Palm Pilot, but it was very outdated when I got it for almost no money, and it didn't call to me)
It is annoying that while the connector itself is now finally standardized, the details of implementation diverge. So while you may be able to charge, it'll be slow charge.
Today, a charger is a full-fledged computer with more processing power than the Apollo 11 spacecraft that brought humans to the Moon. Before the charging adapter starts pumping the voltage, it must first communicate with the smartphone. Incompatibility of the communication software protocol is the reason why a smartphone with USB PD, for example, cannot fast charge from a VOOC charger.
Read on technical details of fast charging technologies. Find out why the best charger – is your old feature phone's charger.
I feel something is missing at the moment with our ability to choose on the device how I want it to charge. Would be nice to plug the phone in and unless I say otherwise it does a nice slow charge even if the cable and charger is capable of more. But if I press a button on the front after I plug it in then I can select fast and it goes as quickly as the combination allows. Its irritating to have to have different chargers for this to preserve the battery.
Its pretty bad that only recent phones have started to add the ability to charge to only 80% to keep the battery in the optimal zone to extend the life given how long we have known that 80% was the optimal maximum. There are also a few phones now able to power themselves from USB without using the battery which if you leave them in chargers a lot throughout the day and night seems like a good feature to have to preserve the battery further.
Maybe all the complexity around this is too much and people just want to plug it in and quick 100% as quick as possible and will change their phone regularly but its pretty wasteful. We ended up going through lots of special chargers that all do very similar things and now you get a device and it often doesn't even come with a cable let alone a charger and you are digging through the specs of your charger, cable and device to work out if its all going to mesh correctly together or you'll be stuck on slow mode. We have ended up with so many standards for getting quicker than the basic charge its going to take a while for all these devices to age out and in the meantime chargers are going to be doing QC and PD and a host of other things besides for a while.
> Maybe all the complexity around this is too much and people just want to plug it in and quick 100% as quick as possible and will change their phone regularly
It's this, 100%. The nerds that care about charge temperature and battery degradation and proliferation of incompatible charging standards are a rounding error, most people just want to know it can charge fast in case they forget and need to leave soon.
I am happy with my Chargie [1], an interposing dongle which provides a Bluetooth receiver and app that lets you set arbitrary preferences on your phone and fast charge, slow charge, or turn off the charger at configurable state of charge setpoints or times.
[1] https://chargie.org/product/chargie-c-basic/
I had never thought such thing existed commercially. Mainly because I had looked for it myself in addition to asking about it without results.
It needs an app but doesn't mention interoperability. There, I said it. It is not perfect.
At least they allow you to set-up-in-app-and-use-without-app which is more than many products.
It is absolutely too much work. It's incredibly easy to get bogged into the weeds of config stuff like this and almost no one will care. if they did, I bet it's turn into a cluster of hearsay about magic settings that make almost no practical difference.
Also, I'd argue it's not obvious that 80% charging is better for most people. You're taking an immediate 20% cut to battery life, and chances are it will take years for it to actually be better than charging to 100%. I guess it's good to have the option, but only if you almost never need that last bit of capacity.
I don't like the 80% option because every time I'm leaving the house for extended periods, going hiking or traveling I think "is it worth it to go through 3 settings screens to take an extra 15% charge with me?" 15% is a micro optimization and it was easier when there was no option and I never thought about it. I want to think about other things, not my phone's battery capacity.
Yeah but in android or something this would be just another "quick settings tile" like the "flashlight" or "night light" or "battery saving mode". You could call it "overcharge mode" or "extra battery mode", and like the "night light" mode it would get disabled once you reach a full charge, so you don't have to dig into settings to turn it off again.
Feel like all of this would be a bit irrelevant if we just had easily replaceable batteries. Phone batteries don’t cost that much.
Rather than worrying about charge speeds and charge %, I’d rather just slap a new battery in after 4 years.
Totally agree. Tbh I never needed the phones to become as thin as cardboard. At the cost of sacraficing the ability to easily remove/replace the battery I certainly never wanted it.
Adaptive Charging on Pixel devices gets most of the way there: it will learn how long it's typically on the charger each day, and automatically slow the rate of charge to match, so that it finishes approximately an hour before you usually unplug it.
There's a manual option to turn it off (charge at full rate this time only), but not to manually turn it on (such as giving it a target time to be fully charged). Older Pixels used what time the alarm was set as the target time to finish charging, which I preferred as someone who doesn't wake up at the same time every day; I'm not sure why they took that away.
Charge it up to 80% in the firmware but show 100% in the UI. Wear leveling algorithms probably do something similar already.
My hack is to only use fast charging bricks, but at home I charge my phone wirelessly. So that means in practice I rarely fast charge it.
Yes, it does heat up due to energy losses, but I suspect that's way less hard on the battery than the same amount of heat from actual high current charging (please correct me if I'm wrong).
This means the only drawback is that my phone charging is cost-inefficient.
My Galaxy S21 lets me pick between normal, fast, or super-fast charging in the settings. Not quite one tap, but it does let you do it.
That said "super-fast" charging on it is like 18W and still about an hour from 20%, so it doesn't really qualify as fast charging IMO, and at an hour is certainly not going to be causing any excess battery wear. It's just normal speed.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quick_Charge
Quick charge started at 7.5W
My charge "Standard" was set in the time 500mA was supplied by most phone chargers. Just saying I am old.
For sure, but for terms of battery wear all that really matters is the time to charge. Under 1 hour is getting into the realm of 'really fast' and heat inside the cell starts to become an issue.
Most multichargers solve it by having faster and slower charging ports. This may be not an app, but a nice / simple hardware based solution
> the best solution is slow charging, for which a low-power charger from your old feature phone is ideal. These devices offer a small power output of 2–5 W, stretching the charging process to 5–7 hours depending on the adapter's power and the battery capacity. This way, your phone's battery charges under the best conditions, minimizing degradation
I've been charging my iPhone this way since the iPhone 4 (trickle charging overnight) and have noticed zero improvement in battery degradation performance vs. fast charging.
As a current example, my iPhone 15 Pro, purchased a month after launch, is at 85% capacity.
>In such a situation, the best solution is slow charging, for which a low-power charger from your old feature phone is ideal.
It seems like most Android phones now have a feature that does this, though you have to enable it. Mine asked me to put in the time I go to bed and the time I wake up, and it slowly charges the battery over that time period to 100%
My Pixel just bases this off of the morning alarm clock. Since I don't like waking to an alarm, this just means that I have a permanent silent 9am alarm.
I do hope that USB PD and (to a lesser extent) Qi takeover the charging space. There is really no reason to have every SoC vendor create their own incompatible fast charging standard.
I never even strictly enabled it, but I'm a big fan. My pixel 5 from 2020 still easily gets a full day of battery life, and without direct evidence, I suspect always slow-charging has helped with that.
Many phones/chargers with propietary protocols are also equipped with USB PD compatibility. For example, you can pick up some random Xiaomi phone labelled at 90W and expect it to charge at more than 20W with USB PD, or even ~90W on some vivo models.
I don't see why the best charger is the old feature phone's charger - the point in fast charging is that you don't have to wait too long if in a hurry. That charger is the "best" if only you have almost unlimited time to charge, like during the night.
One thing I was hoping the article would explain is how fast charging actually works: IE, how does the charge controller turn incoming electricity into a full battery?
The reason why I switched to wireless charging was because I had a phone go bad due to problems with the charge port. USB-c ports on my Pixels to tend to clog with dust and other debris, but as long as I use a wireless charger, it doesn't matter.
All charging does is reverse the flow of lithium ions through the electrolyte that happens when the battery discharges.
Wireless charging is usually worse long term because of the extra heat the coils create from the waste energy. It's probably about as bad as the really fast charging phones do now though. I principally have mine do a slow charge over night these days though as is mostly last through the day.
It's basically as simple as a buck converter that reduces the incoming voltage.
Phone batteries need either 4.2V or 4.35V to charge fully, so whatever voltage comes in (5-20V typically) at whatever current, gets reduced down to the correct voltage and current to charge the battery.
I don't think Apple was the first to use the magnets to align the phone to the charger. I think I had a nexus 5 that had the magnets in the phone and google Qi charger -- that would perfectly align the phone and charger.
Pretty sure magnet alignment was part of wireless charging with the Palm Pre, and I'm not even a Palm person (I did have an IBM branded Palm Pilot, but it was very outdated when I got it for almost no money, and it didn't call to me)
It is annoying that while the connector itself is now finally standardized, the details of implementation diverge. So while you may be able to charge, it'll be slow charge.
Wish they’d kept 12V throughout the PD standards. So useful for hobby stuff
Today, a charger is a full-fledged computer with more processing power than the Apollo 11 spacecraft that brought humans to the Moon. Before the charging adapter starts pumping the voltage, it must first communicate with the smartphone. Incompatibility of the communication software protocol is the reason why a smartphone with USB PD, for example, cannot fast charge from a VOOC charger.
Read on technical details of fast charging technologies. Find out why the best charger – is your old feature phone's charger.