We want our phones to have bigger battery and we also want them to be fully charged in matter of minutes. That’s why companies such as Xiaomi has improved their fast charging technology as phones improve over time.

Xiaomi showed off their 100W fast charging technology in March last year which promised to charge your phone’s battery to 100% in less than 20 minutes. Unfortunately, there have been technical difficulties in finalizing this technology.

According to a post made by Lu Weibing, general manager of Redmi and Vice President of Xiaomi Group, on Weibo, this fast charging technology has to tackle different technical difficulties.

Technical Difficulties

1. Loss of Battery Capacity

The first difficulty is the loss of battery capacity due to very fast charging. Preliminary observation by Xiaomi states that when charging with 100W decreases the capacity of batteries by 20%. For example, 5000Mah batteries charged through 100W decreases their capacity by 1000Mah.

2. Compatibility

Not all phones will support 100W charging since it’s in its early stage of development. 100W fast charging will mature in the future and will be available to different devices.

3. Safety Protection

Fast charging uses more power and more power releases more heat. Multiple safety features should be implemented for the protection of the phone’s logic boards, battery, and of the charger.

4. Power Consumption

With the advancement in LTE networks, 5G-capable phones will use more power than when connecting to the internet in 4G. “The contradiction and balance between fast charging and battery capacity is the focus of everyone’s consideration. By the way, you have to option to choose whether to have 30W of charging on 5000Mah battery or 100W charging on 4000mah (20% off 5000Mah)”, based on the Google Translation of the Weibo post.

Xiaomi, as a company, has great concern for its devices and users’ safety and to be able to protect them, multiple safeguards should be placed. We will see how they will improve this fast charging technology over time.