One of the more eye-catching upgrades offered on the Samsung Galaxy S22 Ultra and Galaxy S22 Plus is 45W charging, which sounds like a big boost on the 25W of the Samsung Galaxy S21 range. But if you were hoping that would mean almost twice as fast charging then you’re seemingly going to be out of luck.
GSMArena has tested the phones with three chargers – a 25W Samsung charger, a 45W Samsung charger, and a 65W third-party charger, and found that the charging speeds are roughly the same with all of them.
A full charge of the Samsung Galaxy S22 Ultra with the 25W charger for example took 64 minutes, and with the 45W one it took 59 minutes. So the move to 45W saved just 5 minutes. The 65W charger split the difference at 62 minutes.
The difference when charging the Samsung Galaxy S22 Plus was even smaller, with the 25W charger taking 62 minutes, while the 45W one took 61 minutes – so just a 1-minute difference.
Partial charges tell a similar story. Juice up the Samsung Galaxy S22 Ultra for 30 minutes from a flat battery and it will reach 61% with a 25W charger according to these tests, while the 45W charger actually performed marginally worse at 60%, with the 65W one managing 65%. The Samsung Galaxy S22 Plus hit 62% in the same time with the 25W charger and 64% with the 45W one.
So in general it seems that using a 45W charger will power these phones up faster, but only by a few minutes at most. That’s all the more disappointing when you consider that plenty of rival phones offer much higher power charging than Samsung even claimed to, with 80W on the OnePlus 10 Pro and 120W from the Xiaomi 12 Pro for example.
It’s not entirely clear why Samsung’s 45W charging is seemingly underperforming so much, or whether perhaps a software update could improve matters, but it’s disappointing to see.
Still, given that you don’t get a charger in the box, this does mean that there’s no need to rush out and buy a 45W one, when a 25W one will seemingly do the job almost as well.
Analysis: the opposite of Apple
This is in some ways the opposite of what we found with the iPhone 13 Pro Max, as while Samsung seems to be advertising higher power charging than its phones can really achieve, Apple seemingly undersold the charging potential of its flagships.
Apple advertises 20W charging for every model in the iPhone 13 range, but tests have shown that with a higher power charger, you can get 23W out of the iPhone 13 Pro and 27W out of the iPhone 13 Pro Max.
That ultimately is still in line with what you’ll seemingly get from the Samsung Galaxy S22 range, but promising less and delivering more is always better than the opposite.
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