5 Smartphones With The Fastest Charging Batteries Of All Time

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Modern smartphones have greatly improved charging speeds, so that despite having bigger batteries than earlier models, they take less time to charge. This is because many major smartphone manufacturers have come up with their proprietary fast charging standards, such as SuperVOOC by OnePlus and FlashCharge by Vivo. Buying a phone that offers some of the fastest charging speeds means you can fully recharge the device quickly at any time of the day, making sure you aren't stranded. It also means you don't have to connect your device to the charger before you go to sleep, as it only takes a handful of minutes to charge, and that can be done in the morning while you're preparing yourself to head outside.

However, with so many smartphones being launched every year, it can be tough to keep track of which models offer the fastest charging. Luckily, we've done extensive research by scouring through dozens of press releases and device announcement articles from various publications to find the five phones that offer the fastest charging speeds ever. We have a dedicated methodology section at the end of the article if you want the full details on how we selected these phones.

Announced in February at MWC 2023, the Realme GT3 (also known as the GT Neo5 in China) set the standard across the entire industry by being the phone with the fastest charging speeds ever. Although it came in two variants, with one supporting up to 150 W fast charging speeds, there was also a model that was capable of 240 W wired charging via USB-C using the SuperVOOC charging standard. According to the Chinese smartphone manufacturer, the 240 W SuperVOOC charger could take the device from 0 to 100 percent in just nine minutes and 30 seconds.

The phone was powered by a 4,600 mAh battery, and it only took 80 seconds from 0 to 20 percent charge. A mere 30-second charge was enough to give you two hours of call time, three hours of music playback, or an hour of video playback, according to the manufacturer. It was the first phone to achieve 240 W charging speeds and, as expected, it raised concerns about whether fast charging would hurt the battery. To that, the company said it could maintain at least 80 percent of its capacity after 1,600 charge cycles.

Since Xiaomi doesn't officially sell its phones in the U.S., the Redmi Note 12 Explorer (also called the Discovery Edition) released in November 2022 is another device that offered snappy charging speeds but wasn't officially available in the States. However, if you wanted a phone with the fastest charging battery, it was one of the best options you could get. The phone supported up to 210 W fast charging speeds via USB-C, becoming one of the first models on the market capable of recharging the battery in under 10 minutes. Thanks to the 210 W speeds, the phone charged fully in just 9 minutes, even faster than the GT3.

But that's because it had a slightly smaller 4,300 mAh battery, while Realme's model has a 4,600 mAh cell. If you're in a hurry, you didn't have to wait the full 9 minutes, though, as a 5-minute charge was all it took to charge the battery to 66 percent. To support these snappy speeds, the phone used the company's proprietary charging standard, which achieved 210 W using three channels of 20 V at 3.5 A each. The interesting bit about the Redmi Note 12 Explorer is that it only cost roughly $330 when it first came out.

So far, our list of smartphones with the fastest charging speeds is mainly from Chinese smartphone companies. Well, the Vivo iQOO 11S, which was launched in 2023, is another one. Despite launching almost three years ago, it still ranks among the fastest charging smartphones, with one of the phone's key selling points being support for 200 W charging speeds.

It was powered by two 2,350 mAh batteries, resulting in a total capacity of 4,700 mAh. Using the 200 W FlashCharge technology, you could charge the battery from 0 to 100 percent in just 19 minutes, which wasn't as quick as the other phones we've discussed above, but it is enough to help the iQOO 11S feature on this list. The iQOO 11S also supported 50 W wireless charging, which is even faster than what Apple's current flagship iPhone 17 Pro Max supports via a USB-C cable. Apart from fast charging speeds, the iQOO 11S featured a Snapdragon 8 Gen 2, which made it rank among the best-performing smartphones from the year.

The race to launch phones with the fastest charging speeds was heated between 2020 and 2023, and so most phones we've discussed so far are from that era. Like the other devices we've discussed, the RedMagic 8 Pro+ was launched at that time, toward the end of 2022. It was launched alongside its smaller RedMagic 8 Pro sibling, and the two were the company's devices targeting the flagship segment running Qualcomm's high-end mobile chip at the time. The 8 Pro+ has a smaller 5,000 mAh battery, whereas the 8 Pro has a 6,000 mAh one. 

However, the 8 Pro+ stood out for offering 165 W charging speeds, and thanks to the GaN charger that came out of the box, the phone only took 14 minutes to fully charge its 5,000 mAh battery. Moreover, Nubia integrated a proprietary R2 chip along with the flagship Snapdragon chipset that made it one of the best gaming smartphones from that year.

Unlike the other phones above, the OnePlus 10T was officially launched in the U.S. as well as in other markets across the globe. OnePlus pulled the wraps off the OnePlus 10T in August 2022, with its charging speeds being one of its key features on board. Officially, the OnePlus 10T supported up to 150 W fast charging speeds using the SuperVOOC standard. However, for the U.S. market, the phone's fast charging speeds were capped at 125 W due to the limitations of the lower voltage 110 V and 120 V outlets. 

With a 4,800 mAh battery, the 10T claimed to fully charge in just 19 minutes when charging at the full 150 W speed. But even if you live in the U.S., the 125 W charging speed meant you only lost a minute, as it took 20 minutes to fully charge from an empty battery. Interestingly, although the phone only supported up to 150 W speeds, it shipped with a 160 W SUPERVOOC power adapter out of the box. 

And despite only supporting 125 W charging speeds in the U.S., you'll find it hard to get newer alternatives on the market that can match the OnePlus 10T's fast charging speeds even today. Even the OnePlus 15, the latest flagship from the company, tops out at 100 W despite having a bigger 7,300 mAh silicon-carbon battery.

To select phones with the fastest charging speeds, we searched various sources on the internet, including media sites and official company websites. Our main goal was to find phones with fast official charging speeds that have been launched to date, not just models that have launched recently. As mentioned earlier, the smartphone charging speed war was in full swing during the 2020-2023 era, and so most of our selections are from that time. 

The phones we've listed are a result of intensive research across different sites that cover smartphones, including GSMArena, PhoneArena, and GizChina. We've arranged these phones based on their official fast charging speeds, from the fastest to the slowest.