Battery life is a very important factor for most people when deciding on a new device. While some companies continue to improve battery life at the battery, others are innovating the way we charge our devices. One form of innovation focuses on the amount of time it takes you to charge your devices; it’s known as Quick Charge, and Qualcomm has hat it in their Snapdragon processors for quite sometime. Now, Qualcomm is releasing a special charger to work with the already made processors.
Qualcomm has quick charge integrated into their processors all the way down to the Snapdragon 400. Qualcomm has continued to integrate and upgrade the Quick Charge options in their processors in the 600 and 800 processor series. Initially, Qualcomm started with Quick Charge 1.0 back in 2012.
After Qualcomm bought a startup that focused on power optimization called Summit Microelectronics, they went to work. Together, they created Quick Charge 1.0, and it sped up charging times by 40 percent. Quick Charge 1.0 could be found in many Android and Windows devices from that time. However, Qualcomm didn’t want to stop there, so immediately went to work on developing Quick Charge 2.0.
Quick charge 2.0 comes in the form of a power adaptor. The Quick Charge 2.0 power adaptor works together with the already installed Snapdragon processors version of Quick Charge. When the two Quick Charge versions work together, charging times will be reduced by up to 75 percent. The Chip inside uses its version of Quick Charge to speak directly with the power adaptor and asks for more power to be passed through. Most chargers will only be able to boost up to 5 volts. However, when you’re using the new Quick Charge 2.0 power adaptor, you can get a boost up to 6, 9, or even 12 volts. With volts that high, you can charge a 3300 mAh battery in around 96 minutes. A normal Charger will take about 270 minutes to do the same. Question is, does your device have Quick Charge 2.0 available.
So far there are only two devices that Quick Charge 2.0 will work with – the HTC One M8, and the Samsung Galaxy S5. In the future, Quick Charge 2.0 will be aimed at larger devices though, like tablets and laptops. Starting this summer, Qualcomm will be selling the Quick Charge 2.0 power adapter. However, it will only be available in Japan via NTT DoCoMo. In case you missed it though, there is another competitor in this market known as Legion Meter. What do you think, would you rather your battery last longer, or will fast charging times suffice?