A couple of months ago I interviewed two key figures in Silicon Valley-based tech company Qnovo - a company thats at the forefront of mobile device battery technology. In short, by carrying out extensive research and gathering huge amounts of data on battery charging and life cycle behavior, Qnovo has developed both software and hardware-based methods of tackling one of the blights of modern mobile batteries, drastically reducing the time it takes for them to charge.

Perhaps more importantly, theres no long timescale involved here; the technology has already been picked up by major smartphone and chipset manufacturers and will be introduced next year. This is very real, its ready and its happening now. Equally as important, is the fact that the technology is very unobtrusive there are no large super-conductors or huge charging circuits or indeed special batteries to contend with.

In fact, the software version allows for significantly faster charging with standard smartphone batteries with no extra circuitry at all. Just some lines of code added to the operating system of a current smartphone can allow a Google Google Nexus 5, for example, to be charged from flat to 50% in less than 40 minutes, compared to nearly an hour and 20 minutes for a standard Nexus 5.

The hardware version allows for even more rapid charging but this needs minor physical additions to the Qualcom chipset that resides in most smartphones and tablets in order to achieve the significantly higher charging power. The new charging techniques that Qnovo has developed also boost battery longevity too.

The company has been kind enough to ship me a Google Nexus 5 with the companys software added using the popular aftermarket Android operating system Cyanogenmod and Ive used a 9W charger, which offers enough power to make use of Qnovos adaptations. You can see how quickly the phone charges in the time lapse video below. I used around 10% brightness on the Nexus 5 but switched all other features off if the phone was switched off, this would obviously lower the charge time further.

As you can see, charging to 50% takes less than 37 minutes twice as fast as the snail-pace 75 minutes for a stock Nexus 5. It reached 100 % in just 1 hour 53 minutes a good 40 minutes quicker than a standard Nexus 5 that takes just over two and a half hours. This is around a third quicker and this is just Qnovos software method the hardware implementation is apparently even faster.

These figures can make a huge difference to how usable our mobile devices can be and once the hardware implementation finds its way into smartphones and tablets next year, well see vastly improved charge times that could give you three times as much power from a 15 minute charge as conventional charging and six times that from charging via a USB port.

This could go a long way in the battle to make our devices last longer, especially if you often forget to charge your smartphone. You can read my full interview with Qnovo about its battery charging technology here and let me know in the comments if faster charging would be useful to you.

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Hands-On: Qnovo Super-Fast Smartphone Charging