Qualcomm just announced it’ll soon only take five minutes of charging to get five hours of battery life on their latest processor. The company’s Snapdragon 835 processor will come with Qualcomm Quick Charge 4 to make charging much faster and save more smartphones from the brink of uselessness. If you can wait for 15 minutes, your phone will get to 50 percent battery life.
It’s welcome news for those of us relegated to walking around with extra battery packs stuffed into our purses for fear our energy-thirsty phones could die at any minute while we’re out and completely cut us off from friends.
Just 5 minutes of charging will give you 5 hours of battery life with Quick Charge 4. High ✋ to that! https://t.co/jkQZdF6sSv pic.twitter.com/3CPfiNQcYL
— Qualcomm (@Qualcomm) November 17, 2016
We can expect to see the new processor in Android phones starting the first half of 2017. And it’s not just faster at charging. The technology will be more efficient and run cooler than earlier generations.
The latest version addresses a problem introduced in Qualcomm’s Quick Charge 3.0 technology. The previous version also delivered a faster battery charge but it did so by using proprietary technology that enabled the delivery of high voltage currents over USB cables.
The non-standard use of the connections in a USB cable meant consumers might have to buy specific USB cables for their phone in order to charge it properly or they could even risk frying their phone during charging. It was concerning enough that Google warned manufactures not to support the technology in their Android Compatibility Definition document.
Qualcomm’s responded to the concern by making Quick Charge 4 compatible with USB Type-C and USB Power Delivery (USB PD). This should appease Google. As well as everyone with a dying phone and five minutes to spare.
