Quick Charge 2.0: Qualcomm's Battery Company May Be The Future in Powering Mobile Technology
Smart phones and tablets are forever getting better. With each new iteration it seems the processing speed gets just a little faster, the images sharper, the screens larger. This is all good for most lovers of technology, but with smaller, sleeker and speedier devices also comes an increasingly shorter battery life.
Developers have struggled to alleviate this by making larger batteries. The trade off however, is that it often takes longer for the device to charge completely. Not to mention, shorter battery life means more trips to the outlet to recharge, effectively eliminating the primary allure of a mobile device, the fact that it is supposed to be mobile.
There may be a solution coming down the pipeline. Ross Rubin of CNet reports that Qualcomm (the company responsible for the "Quick Charge" technology utilized in many Snapdragon based devices) is working on a new version of Quick Charge that would allow for charges up to 75 percent faster than what's commonly available on the market now.
Quick Charge has already become somewhat of an industry standard -- over 70 handsets support the first version. Now Qualcomm is working with mobile developers and power suppliers in order to make sure that Quick Change 2.0 will work efficiently and effectively with new devices, and to help avoid the danger of batteries being overloaded with too much current. And Qualcomm is not the only company working on faster charging solutions. The company responsible for the USB standard recently presented USB Power Delivery, said to report up to 100 watts (enough to power a laptop computer).
While this technology might not be necessary for everyone, it will undoubtedly prove useful to smart phone and tablet users who favor heavy usage of apps and videos. Rubin suggests that we may be seeing companies adopt Quick Charge 2.0 as soon as later this year.