Smartphone “charging wars” are fought mostly on the wired front, where some companies have already crossed the 100W mark giving you a full 0-100% charge in about or even less than 20 minutes. But every now and then the battle shifts to the wireless front where even manufacturers are reaching speeds that were unthinkable a couple of years ago.
One such device is the vivo X80 Pro which we reviewed not long ago and which supports 50W wireless charging. The only problem is that you need a specialized wireless charging stand. We recently received one such charger in our office – vivo’s 50W Wireless Flash Charger and we are now ready to report on what it allows.
To achieve blazingly fast charging times, the vivo X80 Pro has a dual-cell battery with two charge pumps, an industry standard approach used on most new flagship phones today. With its combined battery cell capacity of 4,700mAh, the X80 Pro managed a whopping 79 hours in our proprietary battery life test. The X80 Pro comes with a bundled 80W FlashCharge adapter (20V / 4A) and the corresponding USB-C cable. In our wired charging test, we reached the maximum charge power of 65-66W at 17V and 4A, resulting in a full charge of 39 minutes.
vivo claims that the 50W wireless flash charger can charge the X80 Pro to 50% in 23 minutes while a full charge should take 50 minutes or just 11 minutes longer than the 80W wired FlashCharge solution. The company obviously confirms that actual charging power is “dynamically regulated” and is “subject to actual use” which means you shouldn’t expect 50W power that blows your phone all the time.
Most devices that support Qi wireless charging can charge up to 15W speed. You will need to use a vivo or iOOO charger that supports 66W (or higher) FlashCharge and a compatible USB cable to achieve wireless charging speeds of 50W.
A few short words about the 50W FlashCharge Wireless Charger. It features a dual coil design that allows you to place your phone in portrait or landscape orientation, the latter useful if you want to watch a video while the phone is charging. The cradle features a 60-degree tilt and an integrated cooling fan at the bottom, reaching up to 3,600rpm.
A look inside the charging coils and fan of the 50W vivo flash charger
The charging pad gives it a white and silver look with a glossy surface in the charging cradle area and a satin finish on the back, all in plastic. There is also a frosted clear tip at the front that holds the device you are charging. Vivo is introducing a special night charging mode on its supported phones where the fan will limit itself to 27 Db so your sleep is not disturbed. It won’t be as fast, but it doesn’t matter if you’re spending the night with your phone anyway.
The back of the charger features a USB-C port so you can safely replace cables if needed. Speaking of cables, it’s a little disappointing to see no cables or power supplies in the charger’s retail box given its $ 70 (currently up to $ 40) retail price.
The wireless charger weighs 196 grams while the X80 Pro’s 80W charger and bundled cable come in at an additional 150 grams, so if you’re traveling somewhere and want to bring your own 50W FlashCharge charger and use its maximum known power you’ll be carrying nearly 350 grams of equipment, not counting the phone itself.
In our tests, we measured 58 minutes for a full charge on vivo X80 Pro. That’s 8 minutes longer than the full charge time required for live 50 minutes. We should consider ambient temperature as a variable that may have skewed the results. From our data, we can see that the phone reached 11% charge in just 5 minutes and reached 50% in 27 minutes. The X80 Pro sat at 89% after 50 minutes and hit 100% after 58 minutes.
| vivo X80 Pro with vivo 50W (4,700mAh) wireless flash charger | |
| 0 min | 1% |
| 5 minutes | 11% |
| 10 minutes | 21% |
| 15 minutes | 30% |
| 20 min | 38% |
| 25 min | 47% |
| 30 minutes | 55% |
| 35 min | 63% |
| 40 min | 72% |
| 45 min | 80% |
| 50 min | 89% |
| 55 min | 97% |
| 58 min | 100% |
The charger fan was barely audible during the charge cycle and caused no disturbance. We did not notice excessive heat coming from the phone during the charging process. We also took the device off the charger as soon as it hit 100% and it was slightly warm to the touch compared to idle but not unbearably hot like after a demanding benchmarking session.
For the sake of comparison, we also tried an iQOO 9 Pro, another phone that officially supports the 50W wireless flash charger. The device shares the same 4,700mAh dual-cell battery as the vivo X80 Pro. The iQOO 9 Pro has managed a full charge of 0-100%. 47 minutes – 13 minutes faster than the vivo cousin X80 Pro. The phone was already at 18% after 10 minutes from the start of the test and reached 50% in 24 minutes. From there it went smoothly with 62% after 30 minutes, 84% in 40 minutes and 100% complete in 47 minutes.
| iQOO 9 Pro with vivo 50W (4,700mAh) wireless flash charger | |
| 0 min | 1% |
| 5 minutes | 9% |
| 10 minutes | 18% |
| 15 minutes | 30% |
| 20 min | 41% |
| 25 min | 52% |
| 30 minutes | 62% |
| 35 min | 73% |
| 40 min | 84% |
| 45 min | 95% |
| 47 minutes | 100% |
Last but not least, we also tested last year’s vivo X70 Pro + which was the first phone to support 50W FlashCharge wireless charging. It completed full charge in 70 minutes – 7 slower than the latest vivo X80 Pro and 23 minutes slower than the iQOO 9 Pro. All of this while carrying a smaller 4,500mAh battery shows us the progress vivo made in a single generation of flagships.
| vivo X70 Pro + with vivo 50W (4,500mAh) wireless flash charger | |
| 0 min | 1% |
| 5 minutes | 5% |
| 10 minutes | 15% |
| 15 minutes | 23% |
| 20 min | 31% |
| 25 min | 38% |
| 30 minutes | 45% |
| 35 min | 52% |
| 40 min | 59% |
| 45 min | 67% |
| 50 min | 73% |
| 55 min | 81% |
| 60 min | 88% |
| 65 min | 95% |
| 70 minutes | 100% |
So what are the results of this little experiment? Wireless charging is getting very fast and slowly approaching wired solutions. Unfortunately, there are some barriers to entry with all of the different proprietary chargers and power cords that only work with a select few phones from a single manufacturer. Here is a summary of our results in the form of a graph and we have added MagSafe and charging times on an iPhone 12 Pro as a comparison for a good measure.
So even if your brand new flagship supports 50W wireless charging, you’ll still have to shell out an additional sum for a specific wireless charger to take advantage of that feature, and it’ll need to be paired with the right cable and plug to work.
At the end of the day, having a phone that can fully charge its battery in under 50 minutes without a plug is a pretty cool undertaking, and we can only hope more brands bring this technology forward on their devices. We also hope that manufacturers will work to unify their wireless fast charging solutions so you don’t end up in a wired charging situation where you have to choose between speed and compatibility when purchasing chargers.
Start a new Thread