Infinix All-Round fast charging test – 260W wired charging

Introduction

Watts are the new megapixels – the race for numbers is in full swing in the field of fast smartphone charging. While some choose not to participate (Apple and Samsung, but also Google and Sony), others are pumping out power figures unthinkable until recently. We’ve only just discovered Realme’s 240W solution on the GT3 and you can read our findings in this phone’s full review.

But 240W isn’t the most watts someone dumps on a phone’s battery anymore – and no, we’re not talking about Redmi’s 300W lab test a while back.

We now have Infinix’s versatile fast charging which has 260W stamped on the box, and it’s a box that’s with us in the office. And they also have a wireless one rated at 110W, perhaps even more impressive in its own context. We need to time both and have some pretty crazy numbers to report.

There is a small caveat to mention before proceeding. While Realme’s 240W charging is in a production device and the Redmi is apparently on a test bed somewhere, Infinix’s solution falls somewhere in between. The company is apparently confident enough in its technology to not hesitate to send it to reviewers, but it’s still not a commercial-grade product that you can find in a store. Infinix promises we’ll have a ready-to-go commercial product this year, though, so there’s not much waiting left.

The phone that is the vehicle to showcase the versatile fast charging is a modified version of the Infinix Zero Ultra. Changes include a slightly lower battery capacity (4,400mAh vs. 4,500mAh on the standard phone) and the addition of an induction coil – the Zero Ultra doesn’t support wireless charging. It’s worth pointing out that the Zero Utlra ‘garden variety’ itself is no slouch when it comes to charging speed claiming 180W speed and 12 minutes of time from empty to full.

Unpacking

The Demo Infinix Fast Charging Phone arrived in a specially designed box with the flashy numbers stamped on the lid. The included 260W adapter is quite chunky, as is the wireless charger – if you can even call it a pad. A single USB-C cable is included and this is used to charge the phone directly from the adapter or to supply power from the adapter to the induction charger.

Technology

Infinix’s documentation mentions that they use a 12C battery – that is, it can theoretically be charged in 5 minutes (60 minutes divided by the C rating). It also says that they use a 4-pump system, as opposed to the 2-pump we’ve seen in previous Quick Charge designs. To our understanding this means they’re actually charging two separate batteries, and the voltage reported by Android suggests they have two batteries wired in series – it’s 7.4V nominal, as opposed to the usual 3.7V .

The GaN power adapter is rated up to 20V/13A, and the supplied cable is also rated to support 13 amps.

As for the wireless charging “docking station” (as they call it, which may actually be more fitting than the “pad” we’d normally go with), it allows for both vertical and horizontal placement of the phone and has an in the fan to help heat dissipation. The fan is quite noisy in our experience, although being a super-fast wireless charger it probably doesn’t belong on your bedside table anyway.

Infinix details that they have implemented 142 hardware and software measures to protect the phone and peripherals during high-speed charging, 21 of which are temperature sensors. The company’s internal tests have proven that the battery will have retained 90% of its original capacity after 1000 charge-discharge cycles, or what they say is two years of use – so this implies fairly heavy use .

Test procedure

Infinix has specified a test procedure to achieve advertised charging speeds. While it wouldn’t normally make sense to expect a user to follow a predefined procedure in real life, his recommendations weren’t extraordinary and were somewhat closely aligned with our usual testing methodology. the results are conveniently comparable to those you see in the Charging Speed ​​section of our reviews.

What they asked was that we drain the phone to 4% charge (presumably quickly) and let it sit for half an hour until it drops to 1% on its own. It’s this particular part of the procedure that we didn’t observe so strictly, but there was at least a 15 minute period between the rapid discharge phase and the start of charging that we left the phone idle at 1% so that its internal temperatures drop.

Testing was done at room temperature, which for this particular reviewer’s living room was at least two degrees below the suggested 25°C. The phone remained on during testing and wasn’t disturbed during the process, so its screen was off.

Results

In our wired charging tests, the demo phone reached 100% after being plugged in for 6:27 minutes, although it continued to draw power for a while and Android reported a status. of “full” battery 7:51 minutes after starting it. Technically this is the first issue we publish in our reviews and it is common for phones to report 100% shortly before reaching full state and cutting off the charge.

We reached 25% within the first 60 seconds, as promised in the Infinix documentation, while a 50% state of charge was reached in 2:13.

You could say it was our most “standard” run, but we repeated it several times and on one run we got 5:48 minutes at 100%, while another took 7 :13 minutes and in both cases the phone reported a “full” state in 8:40 minutes and changed. No temperature anomalies were observed and all three passes reached a maximum of 47 degrees at the very end of the process.

We’d say no changes to the test procedure were introduced between runs, but we did have a power meter plugged in between the phone and its cable for the 7:13 minute run. It may or may not have had an impact on his performance, but we’re leaning on “may” because this race was the slowest early on. That’s pretty much why we refrain from publishing the power meter readings – we feel this is another case of “observing the phenomenon alters the phenomenon”.

When charging wirelessly, the Infinix Demo phone reached 100% in 14:28 minutes and it took another 3 minutes to report a “full” state at 17:34 minutes. After 5 minutes we were at 44%, 50% was reached at 6:05, and after 10 minutes we were at 73%.

We don’t keep a database of wireless charging speeds, simply because we often don’t have the ability to test with a particular phone’s “best” wireless charger and this is one of those areas where proprietary solutions make all the difference. This is often the case for wired charging, but you usually get the phone-specific wired chargers in the box in these cases. Anyway, here’s how the Infinix Charge compares to some notable phone models.

instead of a conclusion

We have mixed feelings about super-fast office charging. That is to say, some of us love it for its convenience, others hate it for its perceived impact on battery longevity. The thing is, while the longevity argument is more theoretical since an actual real-world long-term objective test against “slow” charging is next to impossible, the practical benefits of fast charging can be observed immediately.

There is a question that inevitably arises – how fast is fast enough? A half hour? Ten minutes? Five? “Fast enough” does not exist? Well, we’ll try to stay away from philosophical debates like that – if we can’t sort it out between ourselves, who are we to answer you. We’re just a bunch of guys with a demo phone, some chargers, and a stopwatch.