The fast-charging smartphone war has been raging for several years, and now another company has upped its game yet again.
Infinix, the Chinese smartphone maker, has announced 260W wired charging and 110W wireless charging.
The company claims that the 260W technology can charge a phone with a 4400mAh battery from 1 to 100% in 7.5 minutes. It has already presented 160W and 180W solutions.
“The charging architecture uses a 4-pump smart circuit design that intelligently identifies power needs and allocates the number of charge pumps needed to operate,” Infinix said.
“The upgraded 4400mAh high-rate 12C battery [has] a multi-electrode lug structure, which ensures high charge conversion efficiency of up to 98.5%, while increasing battery durability,”
He also claimed that the battery can retain more than 90% of its energy after 1000 cycles.
The same 260W technology would be able to charge this theoretical phone to 25% in one minute. Check out the demo in the video below:
260W is technically faster than the just-announced 240W wired charging on the Realme GT3, which is the fastest charging phone you’ll soon be able to buy. Realme claims the 4,600mAh battery can go from empty to full in nine minutes.
This means that if Infinix’s battery was the same size, the extra 20W saves you 90 seconds of waiting time for that full recharge.
Xiaomi recently introduced 300W wired charging which it claims can fully charge a smaller 4100mAh battery in four minutes and 54 seconds.
This is all getting a little crazy considering it still takes me a good chunk of an hour to fully charge my Google Pixel 7 Pro to its 30W speed. That feels ridiculously slow by comparison, just like the latest iPhones.
If it’s wireless charging you prefer, Infinix also showed off 110W wireless charging that can charge a phone, presumably of the same mysterious capacity, in 16 minutes. Here is the short demo video:
That’s incredibly fast for wireless charging, which generates more heat than wired. That’s why Infinix’s wireless charger has a fan inside to cool everything down. Oppo and OnePlus released similar chargers for their phones, but charging speeds were well below 110W.
While concerns remain in the phone industry that very fast charging is dangerous and could cause batteries to fail and explode, there have been no widely reported issues with any specific phone model since the Note debacle. 7 from Samsung in 2017.
I asked Infinix if its wired and wireless charging technology could possibly be in the same phone as most of the fastest charging phones don’t support wireless – the 240W Realme GT3 and the 150W OnePlus 10T as prime examples.
“The All-Round FastCharge solution will be first introduced on the Infinix NOTE series later this year,” a spokesperson said.
“Infinix has not confirmed at this time if the 260W FastCharge All-Round FastCharge and 110W Wireless FastCharge All-Round will come with a specific model.
It is therefore unclear whether we will see the technology in one or more 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 reach 45W. Neither of these phones come with a charger in the box – but the companies that offer very fast wired charging as a reason to buy the phone usually always include the charger in the retail package.
