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Faster Phone Chargers Explained - Qualcomm Quick Charge 2.0

2015-01-28
cellphone chargers they're all basically the same right you plug it into the wall you throw a USB cable on it then you plug it into the Lightning or micro USB or whatever other connector there is on your phone and call it a day or night if you charge your devices at night which would make sense because look never mind that the point is easy right wrong and you know what else is wrong teasing upcoming videos like part five of homeroom water cooling when realistically they're at least two weeks out and yet I'd do it anyway cooler masters casemod World Series is your opportunity to show off your modding skills and win great prizes entries close February 7th 2015 click now to learn more so four years ago life was relatively simple at least as far as five volt chargers for phones and tablets when you had your USB ports on your computer or very low end wall warts that output 500 milliamps the typical ones and the ones bundled with your phones which are usually one amp ish and premium aftermarket ones and the bundled ones of tablets which were usually 2 or 2.1 amps now even in those days though you sometimes needed interoperability between your charger and the device being charged in order to take advantage of the best possible charging rates because beefier componentry is required to prevent the device and/or its battery from being damaged by the charging process so phone manufacturers like Apple and Samsung used little signalling tricks that would allow their chargers to communicate with their devices to let them know hey it's ok to draw more power fast forward to 2012 and the introduction of Qualcomm quick charge 1.0 an attempt to standardize faster charging so more customers could leverage it at least those customers whose phones contain qualcomm processors version 1.0 was all about optimizing charge times with 5 volt 2 amp adapters that you already own with a fancy power management IC built into the device itself all the user needed to know was that his or her gadget was charging faster especially when it was very low version 2.0 which started showing up in devices like the HTC One m8 in early 2014 takes beyond device hardware a step further and allows it to accept up to three amps from a five volt power supply and even other voltages as well up to twelve whoops volts but the tricky thing is that while both the devices and the chargers are backwards compatible with older lower power ones to take full advantage of quick charge 2.0 we need drastically different power sources that can deliver the aforementioned greater current and varying voltages so if you want to be sure it supports quick charge 2.0 check the box it'll say quick charge 2.0 and it'll come with a pretty steep price tag for the up for a freaking wall board so the question then is is it worth the investment well Qualcomm claims that compared to conventional charging so 5 volt 1 amp quick charge 2.0 can fill your battery up to 5 times more in the same time and even compared to quick charge 1.0 it's twice as fast but their results while surely very scientific we're done on a bare battery as far as I can tell and their form might not really reflect exactly the results we'll see in the real world so I brought this test to the real world suckas i used a nexus 6 from google manufactured by Motorola and tested it in four different scenarios first with an apple 1 amp charger that I've had since I got my iPhone 4 second with a 2 amp wall wart that I got with the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 third with the quick charge 2.0 charger included in the Nexus 6 is box and finally with a third-party quick charge 2.0 charger from pure gear to see if the rated current at the various charging voltages makes a difference on this device anyway since they're actually a touch lower than Motorola's bundled turbo charger maybe that contributes to pure gears smaller size as well actually now before beginning I needed a testing methodology obviously I couldn't just power down the phone and plug it in and stare at it until it was finish so here's what I did I ran a 3d game with the flashlight on to drain the battery until the phone powered off then I plugged it in briefly powered it back on and let it sit at the home screen until it reached 3% any lower and it would shut down again I put it in airplane mode and closed all apps except for battery monitor widget which I configured to pull the battery level once every minute because a big part of the benefit of quick charge is not necessarily the overall charge time to 100% but rather the charge time to go from empty to a reasonable level when you're desperate and we need more plot points than just start and end in order to get that so to ensure we were getting the best possible experience a one-foot micro-b USB cable was used since the cable length can have an impact on charging power and I ended up with the graph that you see here each charge test was run twice to ensure that nothing weird happened so I consider these results accurate to within plus or minus a few percent and overall I learned a few things number one quick charge 2.0 is faster than other solutions number two most two amp Chargers out there you can see I have quite a few of them here are either incapable of handshaking with many devices and enabling faster charging rates or they just plain suck most of them topped out around 1.5 amps number 3 all the 1 amp chargers I have lying around deliver more than one amp including the Apple one that I used for my benchmarks which was the closest to one amp out of the bunch and number four thanks to Qualcomm standardizing this stuff a third-party quick charge 2.0 charger will deliver basically the same results as a first party one something that hasn't always been the case in the past with proprietary standards so cool beans faster charging is good right I mean it's not quite as fast as I was hoping but it's definitely faster actually not always it's great if your phone is almost dead and you've got a blind date in half an hour and you need to make sure you can you know text your friends from the dinner table if it's not going well or if it is going well oh he's so wonderful but juicing up your battery with a higher current charger generates more heat which can negatively impact the battery's overall life spent how many charge and discharge cycles it can handle and given that so many batteries are non replaceable these days this is a bit of a concern so whenever you're plugging in for the night even though you have support for quick charge 2.0 I'd recommend sticking with a low speed charger so thanks for watching guys like this video if you liked it dislike it if you thought it sucked leave a comment if your feelings were more complicated in this let me know what were you expecting out of all of this do genuinely want to read your comments as always you can find a link in the video description to support us you can buy a cool t-shirt like this one you can send us a monthly 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