What to consider when buying a smartphone charger?

Mobile device chargers - a river topic. Some choose them consciously, so as to gain the most efficient charging and use the capabilities of the device 100%, but the vast majority use the chargers included with the device or, when the charger stops working, buy the cheapest possible option. For the most part, this is due to ignorance of the capabilities of the smartphone they own or a lack of orientation on the market when it comes to chargers. This is unfavorable, because by choosing a charger without any theoretical preparation we can not only lose out on the speed of filling our battery, but also even unknowingly do harm to our device, or even lead to a fire.

Phone charger. As the name suggests, the task of this type of accessory is to charge our smartphone. Despite the fact that as time goes by, batteries in devices have higher and higher capacities and are more robustly made, we use chargers far more often than we did some 10 years ago. This is because we now use smartphones virtually non-stop than typical phones with a keyboard or monochrome display. They also have more powerful components that require more power - here it is mainly worth emphasizing the power consumption of the large screens now mounted in such devices. Interestingly, often manufacturers do not add chargers to phones that maximize the current and charging time of the devices. So how do you choose a charger for your device so as to minimize the time it takes to fill up the battery? What options do we have?

But let's perhaps start with the most important issue - the question of safety. Each of the branded and robust chargers has a number of safety features to protect us from unwanted side effects. These include safeguards against over-temperature of the charger, against short-circuit, against over-voltage and the like. In cheap chargers, such protections are either not found, or due to the low cost of production, they may be defective. It is important to have this kind of protection, because its absence can lead to damage to the smartphone, and in the worst case even to electric shock or fire.

Fast charging technologies:

They include such technologies as Quick Charge, Dash Charge, Supercharge and probably hundreds of others - depending on the manufacturer. We will describe the principle of operation on the aforementioned to show the main differences.

Quick Charge is a technology developed by Qualcomm. It is by far the most common type of charging, but it only works precisely with Qualcomm-branded processors. The original version of Quick Charge supported a maximum charging current of just 2A and a voltage of 5V, giving us a 10W charge. At the time, this was not some groundbreaking development, so it went unnoticed. Then came Quick Charge 2.0, which can use voltages of 5V, 9V and 12V, and amperage of 1.67A, 2A or 3A. From this, the maximum charging power is 18W. However, it was still not what users had been waiting for with such longing. It wasn't until Quick Charge 3.0 that it gained favor in the market and became the most popular version of fast charging from Qualcomm. It supports voltage from 3.3V to 20V and 2.6A or 4.6A. To better illustrate this, let me give an example. A smartphone with a battery capacity of 2750 mAh charges from 0 to 80% in 35 minutes. An ordinary 5W charger will charge the same device in the same time to only twelve percent of the battery capacity.

Dash Charge (from Oppo/OnePlus) and Supercharge (Huawei) work on the same principle with one key difference. Manufacturers of this type of charging have relied on increasing amperage instead of voltage. These types of charging technologies output a typical USB voltage of 5V, but have a much higher amperage instead.

Interestingly, the requirements of Quick Charge are z are definitely lower than those of Dash Charge or Supercharge. However, this does not mean that it will work with the first better cable that fits our smartphone. Quick Charge technologies can fail even if the cable is too long or too skinny. It is also not very advantageous that if you have a device with, for example, Supercharge technology, you will only charge it (with fast charging) by turning off a Supercharge-compatible charger connected to a Supercharge-compatible cable, which puts us in the position of a few years ago, where each device had a different charger input and finding the right cable was not as easy and obvious as it is today.

However, not by wires alone does man live, and in recent times the possibility of inductive charging of mobile devices has become very widespread on the market. They have several advantages as well as several disadvantages. Among the advantages is the lack of cables that we need to plug into the device. It is charged through a receiving coil (usually located in the "back" of the device) close to the transmitting coil (a spirally coiled wire around which an electromagnetic field is created). This is also an extremely convenient option, as you simply place the device on the induction charger and at this point the battery charging process is already started. Also in favor of this solution is the small size of the charger and the fact that it is usually universal. This means that you can charge devices with microUSB, Type-C and Lightning connectors on it - because in practice there might not even be a socket - we just need a power receiver. Of course, inductive chargers are not free of drawbacks. Usually the charging time is increased due to the energy losses that take place during the process of changing the electric current into an electromagnetic field. And that not all devices are equipped with coils, allowing wireless charging.

As you can see, the things we should pay attention to when choosing a charger are many. The most important thing is that such a charger should not be a potential threat to the device we own or our health or life, and that it should be compatible with the fast charging technology that our device is equipped with. And this is what we should be guided by above all when choosing a charger for our smartphone! I hope the above article will help you to make an informed choice of the right charger to suit your needs and your device.