The quad-cell battery that folds in half.
Ben Sin
Tech brand Realme held an event in its Shenzhen headquarters on Wednesday to demo several new technology that will eventually make their way to their phones. These include a very useful “solid state button” that is essentially a touch sensitive panel on the side of the phone that supports swipes and taps (the idea is you can use it like a camera zoom dial and shutter button when holding the phone sideways); but the most jaw-dropping and headline grabbing feature is a new 320W fast-charging system that can top up a 4,400 mAh battery from zero to 100 percent in under four-and-a-half minutes.
And yes, Realme demoed the charging in action (as seen in the above video), and it lived up to the billing. In the first 30 seconds, the phone charged from 1% to 15%, and reached 40% by the one and half minute mark.
Very fast charging is not new to Realme, which began life as a spinoff sub-brand of Oppo—the company that has led the mobile industry in charging speed for almost a decade now. In fact, I visited Oppo’s headquarter to report on the industry-leading “SuperVOOC” fast-charging solution six years ago.
The new 320W charging, which Realme dubs “SuperSonic” charge, seems to still use the core principles of SuperVOOC (which prioritizes current over voltage), but to achieve such uncanny speeds, it had to design a new quad-cell ultra-thin battery that folds in half.
The quad-cell foldable battery designed by Realme.
Ben Sin
The reason the battery is segmented into four parts is so each cell can charge individually, which allows the cell to reach peak charging speed faster while keeping heat dissipation to a minimum.
If you’re wondering if such fast-charging is safe, Realme says they designed a new “AirGap” voltage transformer that uses electromagnetic conversion to keep the voltage physically separated from the battery.
The 320W charger is quite small too.
ben sin
Still, that’s only their marketing claim. Only time will tell if such extreme fast charging speeds can hold up. I personally am not too worried, because although Realme is not a household name, it is one of the major smartphone vendors in the world. If you include parent company Oppo and fellow spinoff brand OnePlus, there are tens of millions of devices using SuperVOOC fast charging in the wild and I haven’t heard any major incident of charging gone wrong. I have personally used SuperVOOC charging for years without issues.
A crowd of media gather around a live demo of the charging test.
Ben Sin
The SuperSonic fast charging is not ready for mass production yet, but given the speed at which Chinese phone brands work, I wouldn’t be surprised to see it in a Realme (or Oppo?) device next year.