Cell phone chargers. They're all basically the same, right? You plug it into the wall, you throw a USB cable on
it, then you plug it into the the lightning or micro USB or whatever other
connector there is on your phone and call it a day or night if you charge
your devices at night, which would make sense because well, look, never mind that. The point is, easy, right? Wrong.
And you know what else is wrong? Teasing upcoming videos like part five of whole
room water cooling when realistically they're at least two weeks out. And yet,
I'd do it anyway.
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now to learn more. So, four years ago,
life was relatively simple, at least as far as 5V chargers for phones and
tablets went. You had your USB ports on your computer or very low-end wall warts
that output 500 milliamps. the typical ones and the ones bundled with your
phones which were usually 1 ampish and premium aftermarket ones and the bundled
ones with tablets which were usually two or 2.1 amps. Now even in those days
though you sometimes needed interoperability between your charger
and the device being charged in order to take advantage of the best possible
charging rates because beefier componentry is required to prevent the
device and/or its battery from being damaged by the charging process. So
phone manufacturers like Apple and Samsung used little signaling tricks
that would allow their chargers to communicate with their devices to let
them know, hey, it's okay to draw more power. Fast forward to 2012 and the
introduction of Qualcomm Quick Charge 1.0, an attempt to standardize faster
charging so more customers could leverage it, at least those customers
whose phones contained Qualcomm processors. Version 1.0 to was all about
optimizing charge times with 5V 2 amp adapters that you already owned with a
fancy power management IC built into the device itself. All the user needed to
know was that his or her gadget was charging faster, especially when it was
very low. Version 2.0, 0 which started showing up in devices like the HTC 1M8
in early 2014 takes the ondevice hardware a step further and allows it to
accept up to 3 amps from a 5volt power
supply and even other voltages as well up to 12 whoops volts. But the tricky
thing is that while both the devices and the chargers are backwards compatible
with older lower power ones to take full advantage of quick charge 2.0 0. We need
drastically different power sources that can deliver the aforementioned greater
current and varying voltages. So, if you want to be sure it supports quick charge
2.0, check the box. It'll say quick charge 2.0 and it'll come with a pretty
steep price tag for up for a freaking wall wart. So, the question then is, is
it worth the investment? Well, Qualcomm claims that compared to conventional
charging, so 5V 1 amp, quick charge 2.0
0 can fill your battery up to five times more in the same time. And even compared
to Quick Charge 1.0, it's twice as fast.
But their results, while surely very scientific, were done on a bare battery
as far as I can tell, and therefore might not really reflect exactly the
results we'll see in the real world. So, I brought this test to the real world,
suckers. I used a Nexus 6 from Google, manufactured by Motorola, and tested it
in four different scenarios. First, with an Apple 1 amp charger that I've had
since I got my iPhone 4. Second, with a 2 amp wall wart that I got with the
Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1. Third, with the
quick charge 2.0 charger included in the Nexus 6's box. And finally, with a
third-p party quick charge 2.0 0 charger from Pure Gear to see if the rated
current at the various charging voltages makes a difference on this device anyway
since they're actually a touch lower than Motorola's bundled turbocharger.
Maybe that contributes to Pure Gear's smaller size as well, actually. Now,
before beginning, I needed a testing methodology. Obviously, I couldn't just
power down the phone and plug it in and stare at it until it was finished. So,
here's what I did. I ran a 3D game with the flashlight on to drain the battery
until the phone powered off. Then I plugged it in briefly, powered it back
on, and let it sit at the home screen until it reached 3%. Any lower and it
would shut down again. I put it in airplane mode and closed all apps except
for battery monitor widget, which I configured to pull the battery level
once every minute. Because a big part of the benefit of quick charge is not
necessarily the overall charge time to 100% but rather the charge time to go
from empty to a reasonable level when you're desperate. And we need more plot
points than just start and end in order to get that. So to ensure we were
getting the best possible experience, a 1 ft microB USB cable was used since the
cable length can have an impact on charging power. And I ended up with the
graph that you see here. Each charge test was run twice to ensure that
nothing weird happened. So, I consider these results accurate to within plus or
minus a few percent. And overall, I learned a few things. Number one, quick
charge 2.0 is faster than other solutions. Number two, most 2 amp
chargers out there, you can see I have quite a few of them here, are either
incapable of handshaking with many devices and enabling faster charging
rates, or they just plain suck. Most of
them topped out around 1.5 amps. Number
three, all the 1 amp chargers I have lying around deliver more than 1 amp,
including the Apple one that I used for my benchmarks, which was the closest to
1 amp out of the bunch. And number four, thanks to Qualcomm standardizing this
stuff, a third-party quick charge 2.0
charger will deliver basically the same results as a firstp party one, something
that hasn't always been the case in the past with proprietary standards. So,
Cool Beans, faster charging is good, right? I mean, it's not quite as fast as
I was hoping, but it's definitely faster. Actually, not always. It's great
if your phone is almost dead and you've got a blind date in half an hour and you
need to make sure you can, you know, text your friends from the dinner table
if it's not going well. Or if it is going well, he's so wonderful. Uh, but
juicing up your battery with a higher current charger generates more heat,
which can negatively impact the battery's overall lifespan. how many
charge and discharge cycles it can handle. And given that so many batteries
are non-replaceable these days, this is a bit of a concern. So, whenever you're
plugging in for the night, even though you have support for quick charge 2.0,
I'd recommend sticking with a lowspeed charger. So, thanks for watching, guys.
Like this video if you liked it. Dislike it if you thought it sucked. Leave a comment if your feelings were more
complicated than this. Let me know what were you expecting out of all of this.
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