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With their (understandable) insistence on staying thin, modern smartphones aren’t likely to see significant battery upgrades anytime soon. Getting close to a couple days of juice is still plenty for most, and both Android and iOS have made software tweaks to keep devices running longer, but the dream of, say, week-long battery life isn’t about to become reality.
To make up for that, the mobile industry has made its most significant gains in how quickly you can charge the batteries today’s handsets are stuck with. For instance, Qualcomm — which produces the chips found in most major Android phones — has helped facilitate faster charging speeds with its “Quick Charge” initiative. If your phone and charger are compatible with the Quick Charge standard, it’ll take noticeably less time to top the device off.
You’ll see various Quick Charge 2.0 devices out in the wild today, but Qualcomm announced its successor, the aptly-named Quick Charge 3.0, back in September, saying it’ll be compatible with various phones using the latest set of Qualcomm’s Snapdragon processors. The company also claimed that Quick Charge 3.0 devices will charge four times as fast as a standard unit (compared to Quick Charge 2.0’s 75% increase) and work with the burgeoning USB-C standard, all while remaining backwards compatible with past Quick Charge 2.0 and 1.0 devices. All told, it's supposed to take a compatible phone from 0% to 80% in just over a half hour.
Now that the most prominent of those new, Snapdragon-equipped phones are very close to launching — or, in the HTC One A9’s case, have launched already — anyone planning to upgrade to a new Android device this year may want to look into a charger capable of getting the most out of them.
One such charger is the Anker PowerPort +1. It’s the follow-up to the PowerPort series of USB wall chargers we’ve highlighted before, and it’s on Qualcomm’s list of approved Quick Charge 3.0 devices, meaning it’ll follow all the guidelines mentioned above. The fact that it opens up possibilities with USB-C is particularly crucial — it doesn't guarantee that all USB-C devices will support Quick Charge, but it very much looks like the future of connector technology, and it charges faster than the usual microUSB in its own right.
It’s too early to say how long Quick Charge 3.0 will last, or whether or not it’ll live up to all of Qualcomm’s claims, but after using the PowerPort +1 for a few weeks we can say that it does work as advertised with Quick Charge 2.0 devices. For instance, we were able to take a Moto X (2014) from dead to full in about 75 minutes, which is great. The one downside is that the charger doesn’t come with its own cable, so you'll want to ensure you have a USB 3.0 option on hand.
You can always save cash on a Quick Charge 2.0 charger if you’re sticking with that, but think of this as a way to futureproof for any (compatible, mostly flagship) Android devices you may buy in the next year. We’re comfortable enough with Anker and Quick Charge’s reputations to give the PowerPort +1 a preliminary recommendation today, but we’ll be sure to update if we notice any irregularities once Quick Charge 3.0 devices arrive en masse.
Anker PowerPort +1 Quick Charge 3.0 USB Wall Charger, $21.99, available at Amazon.
