Vivo demos 120W charging ahead of 5G phone launch

It’s still quite difficult to cram lots of power at once into phones without an excessive risk of disaster. Many manufacturers making wall adapters, power controller chips, cables, and smartphones find that 18 watts is just fine, at least for now — beefier, more capable components should be coming to market soon. But in China, it’s been one-upping after one-upping in the race to bring faster charging speeds to mobile devices, if only in demonstrations. For example, Xiaomi recently called out its 100W technology. In turn, vivo has run up the field with a new video showing off how fast 120 watts can charge a phone.

Justin Jian, according to his Weibo profile, is a product manager with vivo subsidiary iQOO. He posted a short clip of the new Super FlashCharge technology in action, showing that it can fill up about 2.4% of a 4,000mAh cell in 15 seconds.

Well, plus or minus a few basis points. You can see the full clip here.

Given that this is just a demo, you can presume that the exact numbers are a bit loosey-goosey.

The bigger picture here is that with Xiaomi’s 100W tech, you could charge a 4,000mAh phone from zero to full in just 17 minutes. With vivo’s 20V/6A…