This astonishing charger takes less than 5 minutes to charge a phone | Tech Reader

It’s a miracle! At least, that’s what Realme says about its new 320W SuperSonic Charge battery charging technology. Following its early tease of SuperSonic, the superfast charging device has been fully revealed at an event in China, and here’s the miraculous part: It can charge a smartphone battery to full in just four minutes, 30 seconds.

By any standards, that’s impressive, and easily beats the fastest charging speeds we’re used to seeing from brands like OnePlus. With the right wall charger, phones like the OnePlus 12 fully charge in just under 30 minutes. It also beats phones like the Xiaomi 13 Pro with its 120W charger, which charges the battery fully in around 20 minutes.

It’s not just the total charge time that’s impressive, as Realme’s 320W SuperSonic Charge takes a minute to reach 26% and two minutes to reach 50% capacity. These figures come from Realme’s lab tests on the  SuperSonic Charge, and while some variation may exist depending on battery capacity and regional power supply, we’d expect it to be close to the real-world performance.

It has taken two years for Realme to finalize SuperSonic Charge, and it works via a combination of different technologies. One of the most important is it seems to need a special “folded” battery, which Realme says is a world’s first. It consists of four cells with a total capacity of 4,420mAh, yet it is still only 3mm thick. The 320W charger itself has dual USB ports and supports several proprietary charging systems including Power Delivery and SuperVOOC, plus something called UFCS.

This stands for Universal Fast Charging Specification, and it’s a standard that wraps various different protocols into one. It has been adopted by several Chinese smartphone manufacturers since its announcement in 2022. Realme indicates the UFCS protocol enables the 320W charging power. Realme’s 320W SuperSonic Charge is an exciting development, but we don’t know when it will arrive on a smartphone. Tech Reader has contacted Realme to find out more about the launch plans, and we will update this article when we hear back.