It seems like most Android phones now have a feature that does this, though you have to enable it. Mine asked me to put in the time I go to bed and the time I wake up, and it slowly charges the battery over that time period to 100%
I do hope that USB PD and (to a lesser extent) Qi takeover the charging space. There is really no reason to have every SoC vendor create their own incompatible fast charging standard.
Its pretty bad that only recent phones have started to add the ability to charge to only 80% to keep the battery in the optimal zone to extend the life given how long we have known that 80% was the optimal maximum. There are also a few phones now able to power themselves from USB without using the battery which if you leave them in chargers a lot throughout the day and night seems like a good feature to have to preserve the battery further.
Maybe all the complexity around this is too much and people just want to plug it in and quick 100% as quick as possible and will change their phone regularly but its pretty wasteful. We ended up going through lots of special chargers that all do very similar things and now you get a device and it often doesn't even come with a cable let alone a charger and you are digging through the specs of your charger, cable and device to work out if its all going to mesh correctly together or you'll be stuck on slow mode. We have ended up with so many standards for getting quicker than the basic charge its going to take a while for all these devices to age out and in the meantime chargers are going to be doing QC and PD and a host of other things besides for a while.
It's this, 100%. The nerds that care about charge temperature and battery degradation and proliferation of incompatible charging standards are a rounding error, most people just want to know it can charge fast in case they forget and need to leave soon.
I am happy with my Chargie [1], an interposing dongle which provides a Bluetooth receiver and app that lets you set arbitrary preferences on your phone and fast charge, slow charge, or turn off the charger at configurable state of charge setpoints or times.
It needs an app but doesn't mention interoperability. There, I said it. It is not perfect.
At least they allow you to set-up-in-app-and-use-without-app which is more than many products.
That said "super-fast" charging on it is like 18W and still about an hour from 20%, so it doesn't really qualify as fast charging IMO, and at an hour is certainly not going to be causing any excess battery wear. It's just normal speed.
Quick charge started at 7.5W
My charge "Standard" was set in the time 500mA was supplied by most phone chargers. Just saying I am old.
There's a manual option to turn it off (charge at full rate), but not to manually turn it on (i.e. give it a target time to be fully charged). But you can set a charge limit manually.
I don't see why the best charger is the old feature phone's charger - the point in fast charging is that you don't have to wait too long if in a hurry. That charger is the "best" if only you have almost unlimited time to charge, like during the night.
The reason why I switched to wireless charging was because I had a phone go bad due to problems with the charge port. USB-c ports on my Pixels to tend to clog with dust and other debris, but as long as I use a wireless charger, it doesn't matter.
Phone batteries need either 4.2V or 4.35V to charge fully, so whatever voltage comes in (5-20V typically) at whatever current, gets reduced down to the correct voltage and current to charge the battery.
Wireless charging is usually worse long term because of the extra heat the coils create from the waste energy. It's probably about as bad as the really fast charging phones do now though. I principally have mine do a slow charge over night these days though as is mostly last through the day.
uycyp•4h ago
Read on technical details of fast charging technologies. Find out why the best charger – is your old feature phone's charger.