Wireless charging has been around for more than half a decade now but the tech is yet to see a major breakthrough, especially when it comes to charging speeds. The more conventional wired charging tech has, of course, evolved significantly with some brands going all out with the tech, announcing chargers capable of up to 65W output, but the same cannot be said about wireless charging.
So far we've only been treated to mostly wireless chargers that output 5W and most of the chargers that do 10W are marketed as fast wireless chargers.
Wireless Charging tech gets a major boost from Xiaomi
One or the main problems arising from this is that a typical wireless charger takes double the amount of time to charge a phone than a conventional wired charger. For example, if your phone takes approximately 1.5 hours to charge from 0-100 percent using the supplied wired charger, it ends up taking almost 3 hours to do the same with a wireless charger. But thanks to brands like Xiaomi, we are still hopeful that the tech will soon catch up.
The Chinese tech firm has been one of the pioneers of true fast wireless charging technology. In fact Xiaomi Vice President Chang Cheng recently revealed on Weibo that the charging rate of Xiaomi Wireless Charging has evolved from 10W to 30W mode over the last couple of years. Now, the start-up-turned-tech-giant is busy working on developing a new record-breaking wireless charging which could break its current 30W capacity.
Record-breaking wireless charging tech
According to Xiaomi VP Chang Cheng, the company has developed a new 40W fast charging solution, which is a new record in itself. Xiaomi also posted a video to show just how fast this "record-breaking" tech is and in the video, we can see a Xiaomi Mi 10 Pro with a 4500 mAh battery getting fully charger on 40 minutes flat, whilst being kept for charging on the wireless charging dock. It can be observed that the phone charged 0- 57 percent in just 20 minutes.
The prototype wireless charger seems to be using a vertical air-cooler to keep a check on heating since wireless charging at that rate is surely going to generate some heat. Meanwhile, there's not much information about when this technology will be available. However, thanks to the video we now know what Xiaomi has in store for us.
Xiaomi Mi 10 and Mi 10 Pro
That said, Xiaomi's latest flagship uses current uses a 30W wireless charging solution, which is still one of the highest wireless charging rates, though there are a couple or more third-party wireless chargers that claim to offer the same output.
The Mi 10 and Mi 10 Pro both support fast wireless charging rates. While the Mi 10 packs a 4780 mAh cell which supports 30W wired fast flash charging and 30W wireless fast flash charging along with 10W wireless reverse charging tech. On the other hand, the Xiaomi Mi 10 Pro uses a 4500 mAh strip battery and while it comes with a 30W wireless charger it has support for up to 50W fast flash charging.
Wireless charging will be a big deal this year
The company won't stop at this as it has suggested in earlier reports that it aims to achieve the kind of charging speeds with wireless charging that some OEMS struggle to achieve even with wired charging.
Xiaomi's demo goes to show that the company is going to do more to make its upcoming flagships more attractive and the company's efforts with wireless charging suggest that the tech will be a major area of development in 2020. With other brands like Oppo and OnePlus also having similar projects in the pipeline, it will be interesting to see how everything pans out.
