How much faster is modern wireless charging versus wired smartphones?

Fast charging technology is a complicated business with proprietary standards and technologies. The wide range of standards and speeds is not limited to conventional wired chargers. Wireless charging is also on the rise, promising lightning-fast speeds that surpass the wired charging capabilities of most phones. At least in the proprietary area.

To see how fast state-of-the-art wireless charging is, we checked out the OnePlus 9 Pro, a Warp Charge 50 wireless cable, an older Warp Charge 30 wireless cable, a Warp Charge 60 wired charger, and brought in a USB Power Delivery charger to simulate typical charging speeds for other phones. With these chargers in hand, we can see at a glance how proprietary standards keep accelerating ahead of more universal standards.

See also: USB-C in 2021: Why it’s Still a Mess

Let’s get to the results in a moment.

Wired charging at 60W is the fastest option, but not by far. The OnePlus 9 Pro took 31 minutes to fully charge, just a few minutes faster than the 39 minutes with the latest 50W wireless charging option. 20% more power only results in an 8-minute improvement in load times, which doesn’t feel like much. Interestingly, an increase in charging power by 20% leads to a reduction in charging times by exactly 20%.

Overall, there is only a small difference in total charge times between these two. This is proof of just how powerful OnePlus’ wireless charging technology has become. You can have both of them comfortably on your feet again with a 15-minute charge. After only a quarter of an hour, 60% or 42% are charged.

Continue reading: OnePlus Warp Charge 65 review: own charging done right

For comparison, I also grabbed the older 30W charger from OnePlus to see how much faster the new version is. At just 48 minutes, it’s still very competitive, if not faster, than the more universal wired charging standards used by many smartphones. Switching from 30W to 50W wireless charging only improves the time to the full, rather small seven minutes. Although these minutes stack up and are 60W wired, they are 15 minutes faster than 30W wireless.

The OnePlus 9 Pro is charged with 18 W via our more universal USB Power Delivery connector. I included this in the results as a benchmark for wired charging in terms of the speed of phones like Google Pixel 5, iPhone 12, etc. This technology took 69 minutes to fully charge the OnePlus 9 Pro. Not terrible, but certainly not what we would call quick.

Fast wireless charging now outperforms the wired charging speeds of some high-end handsets

Wireless charging of the OnePlus 9 Pro with 50 W is a full 30 minutes faster than charging with around 18 W power, which is received by most USB Power Delivery smartphones. It’s not quite twice as fast, but not far away. The fastest wireless charging technologies on the market are now much faster than some of the wired options used in flagship smartphones. The phone’s sporty USB power supply has got to make the game better as it lies in the dust thanks to proprietary fast wireless charging technologies.

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Of course, OnePlus isn’t the only company with very fast wireless charging capabilities. Huawei has its own 50 W charging technology, Xiaomi has a 55 W wireless dock and Oppos AirVooc has a whopping 65 W charging technology. Of course, these are all proprietary and won’t work unless you’re trying to mix and match chargers and phones across brands. We’re back in the wild west of charging standards.

Unfortunately, proprietary is currently the only way to enable super-fast wireless charging. Outside of these Chinese brands, more universal, off-the-shelf implementations like Qi are significantly slower, and wired charging remains by far the faster option to charge. Apple and Samsung phones, for example, only have 15 W.