For all their utility and portability, modern smartphones have one critical weakness: their reliance on recharging. Manufacturers are working on improving – reducing – this deficiency and one of the new technologies being employed is in how quickly batteries may be recharged. Samsung, Qualcomm and OPPO all have their own fast charging technologies, designed to top up batteries quicker. There are two reasons for this: one is that as a battery becomes larger, the old standard 500 mA USB charging rate means that a device could take more than four hours to recharge from empty to full. For a busy individual, waiting most of the afternoon for the device to recharge is an unacceptable compromise. We’ve seen faster and faster chargers: most smartphones today with a MicroUSB charger in the box have a 1A or 2A device. Unless the manufacturer uses a higher performance charger of course, in which case we may see higher voltages and currents applied.
This is where OPPO’s VOOC fast charging technology comes to the surface. OPPO, now one of the top five largest smartphone vendors in the world, have been using VOOC for some time now but we have seen a press render of their latest flagship, which carries a device model designation of X9007 – confusingly the same model designation as the 2014 OPPO Find 7 model. It is unclear what device this could be, with opinions divided between an updated variant of the Find 7, perhaps the Find 9 or the Find 9a, a cut down version of a higher specification Find 9 smartphone. Regardless of the exact consumer friendly model name, the device may include OPPO’s latest generation VOOC flash charging system. The information shows that the Find 9 gains 100% of charge in just fifteen minutes. An OPPO model with the same X9007 designation appeared on the AnTuTu website showing a specification that included a 1080p resolution display, Qualcomm Snapdragon 820 chipset, 3GB of RAM and 32GB of internal storage, a 4MP front facing camera and a 16MP rear camera. This is a high end specification but arguably not a flagship grade device, which lends credibility to the Find 9a rumor.
OPPO demonstrated their newest generation VOOC flash charging earlier in the year at the Mobile World Congress, where they demonstrated how a 2,500 mAh battery could be recharged in just fifteen minutes. This “Super VOOC Flash Charge” technology uses a special 5V power adapter, a military grade USB cable and low voltage pulse charging to ensure that the device does not overheat during rapid charging. It is also believed that the 2,500mAh battery is also customized but the question remains as to how long the device can keep going with such a modest battery.
Otherwise, the OPPO Find 9 model appears to combine a bezel-less type display with what appears to be a fingerprint sensor at the bottom of the screen and a small front logo. The device may also include OPPO’s “SmartSensor Image Stabilization” technology, also demonstrated at the 2016 MWC, which is a sensor-based pixel-level optical image stabiliation technique. One of the key advantages of the SmartSensor system is how it uses significantly less power than the traditional lens-based sensor used in most other sensors. At this juncture, there are more questions than we have answers: we will keep you posted!
