How Good Is Meizu’s New Fast Charging Tech?


Smartphone batteries still represent one of the biggest issues when it comes to today’s smartphones. The vast majority of you probably recharge your smartphone on a daily basis, most people leave it to charge during the night, but you might prefer to charge it whenever you can during the day, especially if you have fast charging. Luckily for us, fast charging has managed to become a standard these days, and more or less every modern smartphone offers some sort of fast charging. Having said that, Meizu had introduced its all new Super mCharge fast charging solution during this year’s Mobile World Congress (MWC) in Barcelona, and it’s insanely fast, well, we’re here to talk more about it and see how good is it.

Now, according to Meizu, Super mCharge can recharge a 3,000mAh battery from 0% to 100% in only 18 minutes and 55 seconds, and no, that’s not a typo. In comparison, Qualcomm’s Quick Charge 3.0 fast charging solution can charge up such a battery from 0% to 50% in 30 minutes, and Quick Charge 4.0 is 20% faster, according to Qualcomm. Most people would probably prefer for their batteries to last a week or something of the sort, than own an extremely fast charging solution, but we don’t really have a choice here, and such fast charging solutions are definitely helping, and are good alternatives until batteries finally evolve. That being said, most of you are probably wondering how safe is this charging solution, can batteries take it and what not, well, Meizu claims they can, without a problem. Now, Meizu’s Super mCharge fast charging solution is using a 55W charging, after years of work and research, Meizu finally managed to achieve that, and accelerate charging speeds by 5.5 times. The company claims that they’ve managed to release the first 55W fast charging solution in the world, well, at least as far as the mobile industry is concerned.
USB charging is 5W, and some other OEMs are offering 15W-18W charging solutions, including Motorola and Samsung, for example. Do keep in mind that Meizu’s fast charging is using a special kind of battery which was tweaked so that it can take such increases in current, that the Super mCharge brings. The Super mCharge is using the charge pump technology, it is comprised out of two groups of circuits, and the charge pump exports half the voltage after transformation. In the end, this fast charging solution improves charging efficiency by 8%, claims Meizu. The company says that their new fast charging solution yields 98% efficiency, while other charging solution can battery reach 90%, some even can’t.
Now, heating up and battery safety is not an issue here, or at least Meizu claims it isn’t. Meizu tested this charging with a special 3,000mAh battery, which they’ve charged and discharged 800 times. That battery managed to retain 80 percent of its capacity after that, which means that it should be able to withstand 2 years of normal use without a problem. Now, as far as safety is concerned, Meizu is using an optimization algorithm while the phone is charging, and the battery reaches only 39°C/102°F while charging, in an ambient temperature of 22°C/72°F (a bit higher than body temperature), which are great news, and heat definitely should not be a problem. It is worth noting, though that Meizu’s Super mCharge fast charging solution will not become commercially available until 2018 or 2019, so we still have some time to wait until we can test this ourselves and enjoy such fast charging speeds. On top of everything, it’s worth mentioning that other companies are doing their best to bring forth high-voltage wireless charging to the table, Bosch is trying to do that, and they’re planning to use 60W current in order to do so by 2020, but we’ll see what happens when the time comes.