Re: Got My Turbo Charger Today (Oct. 15)
On a stock phone using Motorola spec'd batteries, it won't degrade the battery life. Where this whole fast charge thing gets dangerous is when you start trying to charge a phone that has a battery not capable of a taking a fast charge.
A standard Lithium polymer battery can be charged a 1C or 1 X its capacity over 1 hour. A 3900 Mah can be charged at 3.9 amps. Most wall chargers and portables will charge at 1 amp. In the case of the Nexus 6 battery, it will fully charge from dead in just under 4 hours. Not very fast at all but the battery is being charged at a rate well within its safe limits. Now lets say you have a standard 500 mah Lipo battery that is being charged at one amp. Pretty good chance its going to catch on fire or at minimum damaged.
Lets say a typical phone battery last 12 hours. In the case of the Nexus battery, it was consume 325 mah per hour. So in 8 hours, it will have consumed 2600 mah. Now going by what Qualcomm claims is in 15 minutes it can charge your phone with 8 hours of capacity. Which means to get my battery 2600 mah in 15 minutes, it would need to charge the phone at 10.4 amps!
A micro USB connector that most cell phones charge through have limitations. From what I have read, USB 3.0 can take 2.0 amps safely. So the way I see it, regardless of the charging technology, 2.0 amps is the limit.
So how does Qualcomm achieve these fast charging rates? A 3900 Mah battery still requires 3.9 amps to charge in one hour. Do these new phones have a special micro USB port capable of taking on more then 2 amps? I really want to know how this all works. I'm no Electrical Engineer but I do have a decent understanding of batteries and charging but there seems to be something missing from the equation other then a special phone, and special charger.