Xiaomi Mi 12 Ultra could be the first phone with 200W charging

Xiaomi Mi 11 Ultra
The Xiaomi Mi 11 Ultra (Image credit: Future)

Xiaomi already leads the way with smartphone charging speeds, offering a speed of 67W whether wired or wireless in the Xiaomi Mi 11 Ultra for example, and going up to 120W for wired charging with the Xiaomi Mi 10 Ultra. But next year it could launch a phone with 200W wired charging.

That’s according to MyDrivers, citing “bloggers” who apparently claimed that Xiaomi would debut 200W charging tech in or around June 2022.

The site theorizes based on this that the Xiaomi Mi 12 Ultra might be the first phone to sport this charging power, which seems a reasonable guess, as we’d expect it to come to a flagship. That said, the Mi 11 Ultra was announced in late March, so that might mean a slightly later launch for 2022’s model.

We know it's in the works

While we’d take this timing with a pinch of salt, it’s no secret that Xiaomi is working on 200W charging tech. The company announced it earlier this year and claimed that it could get a 4,000mAh battery from zero to 100% in just eight minutes, or 15 minutes wirelessly.

Xiaomi hasn’t revealed if or when this tech will come to a consumer device, but given that the company keeps pushing up charging speeds, we’d have thought it would be likely to sooner or later, even before this latest report.

For comparison, the Samsung Galaxy S21 range only offers 25W charging, and the iPhone 12 range has just 20W charging, so 200W would offer massively more power. In fairness, those two brands are at the low end of charging speeds for premium phones, but even the likes of OnePlus top out at 65W.

Of course, there can be downsides to faster charging, the biggest one being that the battery can potentially degrade faster. But Xiaomi claims that after 800 charging cycles (which would take more than two years if you’re fully charging your phone every day) the battery would only lose around 20% of its capacity.

That’s actually better than average, with Power Bank Expert claiming that typically a smartphone battery will lose that much of its capacity after just 500 charging cycles.

So if Xiaomi can deliver tech that fully charges a phone in under 10 minutes without rapidly wearing out the battery, then the Mi 12 Ultra – or whatever handset it arrives on – could be one of the most exciting phones of 2022.

Via GSMArena

James Rogerson

James is a freelance phones, tablets and wearables writer and sub-editor at TechRadar. He has a love for everything ‘smart’, from watches to lights, and can often be found arguing with AI assistants or drowning in the latest apps. James also contributes to 3G.co.uk, 4G.co.uk and 5G.co.uk and has written for T3, Digital Camera World, Clarity Media and others, with work on the web, in print and on TV.