Smartphones get faster all the time, and their cameras get better, but those changes are incremental. Charging speed, on the other hand, is fast approaching the point where you'll be able to plug in a smartphone when you start brushing your teeth and have it fully juiced up by the time you finish.
China's Oppo has been on the forefront of quick charging technology, and the company's latest smartphone, the Reno Ace, boasts a 0-100 percent charging time of 30 minutes. When the company sent me a review unit, the first thing I wanted to test was charging time, and — quite amazingly — the result was even better than Oppo's claim. Check out the video below, sped up for your viewing pleasure.
Charging the Oppo Reno Ace from a completely drained battery to 100 percent only took 29 minutes and 33 seconds. This is faster than any other smartphone I've tested, besting Oppo's own F9 pro — the king of speedy charging a year ago — by a whopping 44 minutes.
The 29-minute charging time doesn't tell the whole story. It only took two minutes for the Oppo Reno Ace's battery to get to 11 percent. In five minutes, it was at 27 percent; in 10 minutes, it was at 49 percent, and at 15 minutes it was at 68 percent. At the 20-minute mark, the phone was 85 percent charged, which is plenty in most scenarios.
Note that the Oppo Reno Ace was at 99 percent battery life after 26 minutes and change, and it took a disproportionately large amount of time to clear that last percentage point (which, realistically, you'll never need). And if you're wondering whether the phone got crazy hot after charging this fast, the answer is no — it wasn't noticeably hotter than any other phone after a wired charging session.
Oppo Reno Ace works best with Oppo's proprietary SuperVOOC 2.0 charger.
Image: Stan Schroeder/Mashable
The result is even more astonishing given that the Oppo Reno Ace packs a pretty large, 4,000mAh battery, which will likely be enough to last you a full day or more. With charging this fast, you could easily stop charging your phone at night (as most of us likely do) and just charge it when you feel like it (though you do need Oppo's 65W SuperVOOC 2.0 charger for the best results).
The (big) caveat is that Oppo's Reno Ace is only available in China at this point, but it's likely only a matter of time before this technology trickles down to other devices and other manufacturers.
