Qualcomm’s 100W charging scheme will go from 0-50 in 5 minutes

In the constantly incremental march of technology, it’s not often you get to call something “revolutionary,” but Qualcomm’s Quick Charge 5 just might be that. The new quick-charging scheme promises to fully charge your phone in just 15 minutes and go from zero to 50 percent charge in five minutes. When the battery is under 50 percent, it will go up one percentage point every six seconds. Qualcomm is calling it the “World’s fastest commercial charging solution,” and it will probably change how you charge your phone.

Qualcomm’s eye-popping numbers are based on a 4500mAh battery with a stacked cell configuration (called “2S” and “2SnP” in the slides), allowing it to pump 50W into each cell, for a total of 100W of charging power. Qualcomm says the dual-cell battery architecture helps with charging efficiency, which is 70-percent higher and 10°C cooler than Quick Charge 4 (which is, admittedly, a three-year-old standard.)

Quick Charge 5 will also support USB-PD, so it should be able to charge even larger electronics at full speed. Qualcomm makes a big deal out of the branding, but really, as a USB-PD Programmable Power Supply (PPS) device, it should be able to negotiate the correct power and charge many non-Qualcomm Quick Charge 5 devices at top speed. There’s actually nothing limiting this to a USB cable either. Wireless quick charging is also supported.

The most important feature of Quick Charge 5 over other fast charging solutions is that it will be widespread. Lately, we’ve seen similar high-power charging announcements from companies like Oppo, or Xiaomi’s experimental 100W solution last year, but Qualcomm’s tech, since it’s from Qualcomm, will actually see a wide commercial rollout. This is, after all, how Qualcomm works. Everybody needs a Qualcomm modem, so you might as well buy the Qualcomm SoC, too, since it integrates the best with Qualcomm’s modem. While you’re in the Qualcomm store, you might as well pick up some Qualcomm antenna modules, oh, and can we interest you in the new Quick Charge 5 chips? OEMs can easily add Quick Charge 5 as an option for basically every high-end Android phone, starting with the Snapdragon 865 and continuing in “future premium- and high-tier Snapdragon mobile platforms.”

Quick charging has been one of my favorite features of modern smartphones for the past few years, and with Quick Charge 5, we’re definitely hitting the point where user behavior around charging will change. When your phone fully charges in 15 minutes, it stops being something you do overnight and starts being something you can just do while you make your morning coffee. Plugging in a phone overnight doesn’t make sense anymore.

Qualcomm says Quick Charge 5 chips, called the “SMB1396” and “SMB1398,” are currently sampling and should appear in commercial devices in Q3 2020.