0 to 50 in 5 Minutes: Qualcomm Quick Charge 5 Could Be Wicked Fast

Qualcomm’s Quick Charge platform has sort of become an industry-standard having been used on a wide range of phones, tablets, and more. But now for Quick Charge 5, Qualcomm is giving its charging platform a massive boost in speed.

Boasting support for charging speeds of more than 100 watts, Quick Charge 5 is around four times faster than Quick Charge 4.0+ (which topped out at 27 watts). Qualcomm claims Quick Charge 5 can charge a device with a 4,500 mAh battery from 0 to 50% in just five minutes.

But what might be even more important than its charging speeds is that Quick Charge 5 is a superset of all of Qualcomm’s previous versions of Quick Charge while also offering full-support for the USB-Power Delivery spec. That means Quick Charge 5 is backward compatible with every device using an older Quick Charge standard while also being compatible with newer USB-PD devices which include a growing number of tablets and even laptops.

This stands in contrast to something like Oppo’s new Flash Charge tech, because while Flash Charge is technically a bit faster with support for up to 125 watts of power, Flash Charge is proprietary tech that doesn’t see much use on non-Oppo devices.

Quick Charge 5 is also 70% more power-efficient than Quick Charge 4, which should lead to less wasted energy and cooler charging temps, with Qualcomm claiming Quick Charge 5 runs up to 18 degrees Fahrenheit cooler than QC4. To help extend the life of your device’s battery, QC 5 includes Qualcomm’s new Battery Saver tech, which looks to maximize power efficiency and reduce the thermal impacts of charging.

Qualcomm has even created something called Smart Identification of Adapter Capabilities, which requires QC5 devices to communicate with the power brick it’s attached to in order to verify things like voltage ranges, current behavior, and more, along with checks for 12 different voltage, current, and temperature measurements. That should help keep things from getting too toasty in your phone’s battery.

While there isn’t a set date for when Quick Charge 5 will start appearing on actual retail devices, Xiaomi has already committed to including QC5 in a range of upcoming products with QC 5 expected to become more widely available on devices starting sometime in Q3 2020.