Confirmed: A OnePlus phone will launch this year with 150W wired charging

As of today, the most recent globally available OnePlus phones charge at 65W with a cable (the OnePlus 10 Pro charges at 80W, but it is still China-only). Depending on the phone’s battery capacity, this could get you from zero to full in around 30 minutes.

Well, OnePlus doesn’t think that’s fast enough. At some point this year, a new OnePlus phone will launch with a 150W charging speed, which is more than twice as fast as the 65W charging of the OnePlus 9 Pro.

Required reading: Which is the best fast-charging cable for you?

This unnamed future OnePlus phone will have a battery capacity of 5,000mAh and come with the necessary 150W charger. OnePlus says it will charge from zero to full in 17 minutes. A brief five minutes on the charger will get you from zero to 50%.

SuperVOOC 150W charging standard

These new speeds will be part of the SuperVOOC charging standard. As OnePlus is now fully invested in “OnePlus 2.0,” it has abandoned its own Warp Charge brand and adopted OPPO’s proprietary standard. Yes, that means we’ll see these 150W speeds on OPPO phones as well. We’ll also see it on realme phones, but that company is sticking with its own “UltraDart” branding for whatever reason. Regardless, OnePlus will have it out on a commercial phone first.

This new iteration of SuperVOOC builds on the same core technology of the 125W standard OPPO launched in 2020. However, that technology never made it to a phone you can actually buy. Apparently, it still needed some work.

At Mobile World Congress 2022, we had the chance to test out the new SuperVOOC. When you plug in a phone, you can see the numbers go up at an astounding rate. Within about 10 seconds, the battery charge had already gone up by about 1% and just continued rising from there.

OPPO has already partnered with Anker to develop third-party chargers with this standard. That means you won’t need to buy an additional charger from OnePlus, OPPO, or realme if you’d rather get them from Anker.

What about battery degradation?

One of the biggest problems facing ultra-fast wired charging standards is battery degradation. Basically, the faster you charge a battery, the faster it degrades. This is why most smartphones these days still stay well under 50W for wired charging speeds.

See also: Charging habits to maximize battery life

OnePlus and OPPO have apparently solved this problem, at least when it comes to real-world smartphone ownership (the companies have not figured out how to circumvent the laws of physics). According to OnePlus, the new 150W charging standard is good for 1,600 cycles before the battery degradation would go below 80%. That’s enough to charge your phone from zero to full every day for four years straight.

So what’s the catch? The big catch with the new SuperVOOC is that it requires phones to be thicker. OnePlus has been trying for the past few years to find the right balance between device size, battery capacity, battery longevity, and charging speeds. This 150W standard appears to be what it’s settled on.

We have no idea what phone will have this standard first. Theoretically, OnePlus would launch a “T” model in the second half of the year, possibly a OnePlus 10T Pro. However, with OnePlus 2.0, the company’s historical moves don’t really mean much anymore, so the phone the new SuperVOOC launches on could be anything.