Qualcomm has posted about its Quick Charge 1.0 power management initiative, and as its name indicates, this technology is designed to charge smartphones “up to 40%” faster. Qualcomm acquired this last year when it bought Summit Microelectronics in June 2012. There is no question that battery capacity is not going to improve radically from a strcutural stand point, and while handset do get bigger batteries, they can only do so as long as the handset themselves get bigger. Fast charging is therefore the most likely path to real battery progress, and Qualcomm understands that perfectly.When is it coming out, you may ask? Well, you may already have it in your hand! With phones like the Galaxy S3, the Nokia Lumia 920 or the LG Nexus 4 and 67 other devices on the market, finding a Qcuik Charge 1.0 enabled handset won’t be hard.
I don’t think that Quick Charge necessarily requires a SnapDragon processor, although I’m not sure what Qualcomm’s policy is when it comes to bundling this. It may be that only Snapdragon-based handset will benefit from this. Competitors may also have equivalent technologies that are not promoted as much. This is something that we should add to our benchmark tests, and in fact we’ve already done that in our Samsung ATIV S Review.