Long-term battery test: Does fast charging actually harm smartphone battery life?
Techies from the relatively new YouTube channel HTX Studio have gone to great lengths to find out whether fast charging actually harms battery life, as is often claimed. Is it better to charge your smartphone overnight with a slow 5-watt charger or perhaps only use between 30 and 80% of its total capacity? Both questions and several others are answered in a compact form in a short, 7-minute video that is clearly the result of time, technical and production effort. If you don't want to spoil the surprise, we'll reveal the results afterwards.
Methodology
10 Apple iPhone 12 models and ten iQOO 7 phones were divided into four groups:
- Three iPhones and Android phones were assigned to a fast-charging group. The former were charged at a maximum of 20 watts (the maximum for iPhone 12), the latter at up to 120 watts.
- Three iPhones and Android phones were charged in a slow-charging group at (presumably, not specified) 5 watts and the iQOO models at 18 watts.
- Three iPhones and Android phones were placed in a special group that was only charged between 30% and 80%.
- One iPhone and one iQOO phone each served as a control group and were not charged during the 6-month test.
The battery capacity of all smartphone batteries was measured before and after the tests. The charge and drain test itself was automated via a discharge loop app, which activates charging via a relay as soon as the battery capacity reaches 5%. After 500 charge cycles, the following remaining battery capacities were observed for the four groups:
Results
The results are quite clear. Fast charging does not lead to significantly reduced battery capacity after 500 charging cycles on either iPhones or Android phones. Always using your smartphone in the "ideal" range between 30 and 80% capacity can result in a slight increase in capacity after numerous charging cycles. In the test, this amounted to 4% more capacity for iPhones and 2.5% more for the Android phones tested. Nevertheless, the tester's conclusion was: it makes virtually no difference how or how quickly you charge your smartphone battery.
From minute 3:40 onwards, other questions about batteries are addressed, such as whether it is better to store them when they are half-charged, fully charged or barely charged. A week may not be long enough, but no difference in capacity was observed during this period. Incidentally, the effort that went into this video is only half the story. As the last few minutes of the video show, there have been two similar experiments in the last two years, but they did not yield conclusive results. The anecdote about the tester's first iPhone, which ends the video, is also quite touching.
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