Huawei teases its 'old' fast-charging technology that can charge to 48% in just 5 minutes

It's quite inevitable for smartphones batteries to be drained quite quickly these days, given our extended usage, the demanding power-hungry hardware and battery-juice-loving applications.

But have you ever wished to be able to replenish your smartphone battery in no time. Sure, we have Qualcomm Quick Charge 4.0, but it's still not that quick enough.

That's where Huawei thinks it has a solution. Researchers from Huawei's Watt Lab are claiming they have developed a next-generation quick-charging technology that could fill a phone's battery 48 percent in just 5 minutes, which is about 10 times faster than conventional forms of charging.

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Huawei has put up a video on YouTube showing off this new quick-charging technology. However, the video has one big catch – the technology depicted in it was first demonstrated by Huawei back in 2015, and the charging setup looks quite unconventional for modern-day use.

As we can see from the video, the battery has way more metal contacts (12, to be exact) than a normal smartphone battery. But a bigger concern is that the setup does not allow you to charge the battery inside the phone. Rather, it has to be taken out of the handset and charged in an external device.

Although we would love to see removable batteries make a comeback in smartphones, this technology is unthinkable with modern-day smartphones — most of which come with non-removable batteries.

The video, although released recently, shows an old Huawei smartphone (at around 0:50 seconds) with a removable battery, which was pretty standard back in 2015.

However, Huawei showing the technology now hints at a possibility that the Chinese tech giant might be building up the hype for something similar that it has in mind for MWC 2018 — something that uses the same technology but in a more modern and updated setup. But we will have to keep our fingers crossed for that.

Also read: Samsung uses graphene in Li-ion batteries to charge 5x faster, last 45% longer

Meanwhile, an article in Digital Trends from November 2015 revealed Huawei had unveiled this quick-charging technology during the 56^th Battery Symposium in Japan.

Huawei had claimed at the time that the setup can charge a 3000mAh battery to 48 percent in as little as five minutes.

To achieve this level of fast-charging, the Huawei Watt Lab researchers bonded heteroatoms to the molecule of graphite in the anode, which acts as a catalyst for capturing and transmitting lithium through carbon bonds.

Huawei claims this technology will not only bring a revolution in smartphones but also in other electronic devices that require a battery to operate like laptops, wearable devices and electric vehicles.

Source: Digital Trends