160W fast charging that won’t melt your phone

Fast charging is one of the hottest innovation areas in the smartphone industry right now. Various manufacturers, especially from China, offer a charging power of over 100 W in their high-end smartphones, with which your phone can be back in the black in a few minutes.

Infinix’s fascinating Concept Phone 2021 is all about ultra-fast charging. With an industry leading power of 160W, the company claims the phone goes empty to full in just 10 minutes. In comparison, the iPhone 12 series charges with just 20 W, the Samsung Galaxy S21 series with 25 W and the fast OnePlus 9 Pro with 65 W.

The Infinix concept makes some bold claims about its fast charging capabilities. But how fast is it in reality and does it make sense to charge a small cell phone battery with that much juice? Let’s dive into the data.

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Before we get to the data …

Before we dive into how fast the Infinix 160W charger is, let’s take a closer look at how the technology works and what Infinix has done to ensure that so much power is safe to use in a smartphone form factor .

The Infinix Concept Phone’s 160 W fast charging system consists of four main components. The first is a Super Charge Pump, which offers a charge conversion of up to 98.6% for smartphones, so that there is only minimal energy and heat loss in the handset. This is combined with 60 different built-in safety triggers that can apparently stop charging depending on the status of the charging cable, mobile USB-C port and power adapter.

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The Concept Phone 2021 from Infinix contains an 8C battery cell. C-rate describes the internal resistance of a battery and the ability to handle high charging and discharging currents for a given capacity. Infinix’s 8C battery offers 18% lower internal resistance compared to 6C cells used in Oppo’s 125W charging solution. While charging, Infinix also monitors the battery temperature to keep it below 40 ° C (104 ° F). Temperature management is a must to keep the battery life longer while charging at these very high speeds.

In addition to Infinix’s proprietary 160 W charging speed, the charging plug also supports the universal USB Power Delivery and USB PD PPS specifications with up to 100W. USB PD runs at 5-15V 3A and 20V 5A, while PPS offers a scalable voltage from 3.6V to 20V with up to 5.1A of current. So yes, this 160W charger can quickly charge a Samsung Galaxy S21, but still only at 25W.

160W charging speed test

Last but not least, Infinix’s 160 W ultra flash charge is really very fast. The company says it can fully charge the phone’s 4,000 mAh battery in just 10 minutes. I recorded a fraction over 11 minutes to full recording with the dual color changing housing technology disabled. Impressively, the Concept Phone reached 50% battery after just five minutes and 75% after just over seven minutes. Talk about a quick top-up.

Our test recorded 175 W of peak power from the wall and 142.6 W (17.7 V, 8.29 A) at the USB port on the smartphone. This results in an energy efficiency of 81.5%. Not the best on the market, but not far from a typical score for a modern high performance GaN charger. Interestingly, the internal battery voltage is around 8V, double that of a standard phone battery. This suggests that Infinix is ​​stacking its batteries in series to allow charging at a much higher voltage than typical smartphone charging (almost 18V versus 9V typical).

Let’s compare this to another example of super-fast charging technology: Xiaomi’s 120W charger. For reference, it took Xiaomi’s charger 21 minutes to charge the Mi 10 Ultra’s 4,500 mAh battery.

A quick piece of math shows that Infinix’s 160W technology charges at around 363 mAh per minute, while Xiaomi’s 120W technology charges at 214 mAh per minute. The solution from Infinix is ​​an incredible 41% faster with the same battery capacity.

We tested the Concept Phone with other universal chargers as well, but the maximum power I was able to get was only 19W. Unfortunately, the phone’s only quick charge option is proprietary. Even so, 19W isn’t far from what you’ll find in many of today’s flagship smartphones like the iPhone 12, and the Concept Phone fully charges in 55 minutes in this mode. Infinix’s 160W solution is 5x faster, but uses around 8x as much power. While the 160 W mode reaches 53% of the battery after five minutes, the 19 W charge only manages 11%.

Finally, we tracked the smartphone’s battery temperature while it was fast charging. Take these software sensor readings with caution as they can vary from device to device.

The Infinix cell phone measures just above the self-imposed 40 ° C limit, but only in the last minutes of the charging cycle. I clocked the phone at a peak of 41.9 ° C, which is not bad considering the high power consumption. The low-resistance battery and efficient circuitry seem to do their job very well.

Back to our Xiaomi Mi 10 Ultra comparison: this phone recorded a peak of 43.8 ° C and spends more time in the red zone. Likewise, the OnePlus 9 Pro, which is charged with 65 W Warp Charge, reaches a peak value of 43.2 ° C, reaches 40 ° C faster and spends more time at high temperatures than its competitors. The solution from Infinix surprisingly appears to be 1-4 ° C cooler than other fast charging solutions, which means slightly less wear and tear on the battery per minute that is plugged in.

All of these fast charging technologies are a little on the hot side. But keep in mind that the Infinix only exposes its battery to high temperatures for less than 11 minutes, compared to the Xiaomi’s 21 and OnePlus’ 28 minutes. While it’s still a little too warm for my taste, Infinix’s temperature-conscious fast charging technology is very impressive.

Is Infinix 160W charging good?

Fully charging your smartphone in just over 10 minutes is an incredible feat. However, the real revelation of the Infinix 160W charging solution is the use of temperature-conscious charging technology.

As the temperature and battery percentage increase, Infinix Ultra Flash Charge reduces the amount of energy sent to the phone. The power dropped from 160W to 80W after a few minutes, and then to around 60W when the phone stopped charging. This has the additional advantage that the ideal battery charging properties are adjusted if additional power should be provided earlier in the charging cycle.

The intelligent power scaling prevents the phone’s battery temperature from rising too early and still offers an astronomical amount of charging power. I would like an even more aggressive temperature management (approx. 37 ° C) to maximize battery life with little effort for charging time, but Infinix is ​​the best implementation I have so far of a balanced ultra-fast charge solution.

The combination of high-end battery technology and intelligent monitoring enables high-performance charging within reasonable temperature limits. However, there are still unanswered questions about the cost of a commercial product that incorporates all of these technologies, such as: B. the screen switch-on time and the life of the battery over the life of a handset.