Oppo demos 240 W smartphone charging, takes a phone to full in 9 minutes

Exactly how quickly do you need your smartphone to charge? Oppo is setting new records for smartphone charging speeds, both for commercial smartphones and in a lab setting.

The headline-grabber today is the company's unbelievably fast 240 W "SUPERVOOC" charging prototype, which can power a 4500 mAh smartphone battery to 100 percent in nine minutes and hit 50 percent in just 3.5 minutes. That's 1 percent about every four or five seconds of charging time. The prototype Oppo brought to Mobile World Congress has a battery percentage readout that goes to two decimal places, so you can watch those numbers really fly upward.

240 W is just for a prototype phone, though, and there's no telling what these kinds of charging speeds would do to your battery after a few charging cycles. For a speed that Oppo is ready to commercialize while still balancing battery longevity, it's also announcing a 150 W charging scheme that will make it into phones this year, including a phone from Oppo's BBK sibling company, OnePlus. (The OnePlus 10 Pro, which launched earlier this year in China, is up to 80 W.)

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