A little more than three years after Quick Charge 4+ was announced, Qualcomm has finally taken the wraps off of Quick Charge 5.0 – the next-generation charging standard that can power up your device in a matter of minutes. The new standard is expected to be included in smartphones over the next few months, with supporting accessories likely to follow.
Quick Charge 5.0 offers a number of advantages over previous-generation versions of Quick Charge. For starters, according to Qualcomm, it’s the first charging standard to support over 100 watts of power for smartphones.
The result? If you use a Quick Charge 5.0 charger with a compatible phone, you should be able to charge your phone from 0 to 50 percent in only five minutes — and you’ll get your phone up to 100 percent in around 15 minutes.
It’s the first charging standard to support over 100 watts of power for smartphones.
“Quick Charge 5, our fastest and most versatile charging solution, will enable consumers to enjoy their devices for longer periods of time, without worrying about the time required to recharge. We are proud to expand our technology portfolio and make accessible 100W+ charging a commercial reality,” said Ev Roach, vice president of product management for Qualcomm Technologies, Inc.
Qualcomm says that the new standard is a massive 70 percent more efficient than Quick Charge 4. And it delivers power 10 times faster than the original Quick Charge 1. That’s while remaining 10 degrees Celsius cooler than Quick Charge 4.
Quick Charge 5.0 is backwards-compatible, so if you use a Quick Charge 5.0 charger with a phone that supports Quick Charge 3.0, you’ll still get Quick Charge 3.0 speeds on that device.
The new standard is supported by the Snapdragon 865 and Snapdragon 865 Plus, but manufacturers will have to implement the tech for their devices to take advantage of it. In other words, just because you have a phone with a Snapdragon 865, that doesn’t mean you’ll be able to make use of Quick Charge 5.0.
We’ll have to wait and see just how long it takes for Quick Charge 5.0 to be supported on a wide scale. Xiaomi has said that it plans on supporting the new standard, but it hasn’t said just when it will do so. Even when phones support the standard, it may take a little longer for accessory manufacturers to adopt it.
