In the blink of an eye, entering 2023, looking back on the smartphone industry in the past year, it can only be described by four words of carrying a load. This is mainly because the dividends of the smartphone industry have disappeared.
According to data from Canalys, from the first quarter to the third quarter of 2022, global smartphone shipments fell by 11%, 9% and 9% year-on-year, respectively. Since 2017, the smartphone industry has begun to shrink, and the sudden epidemic after 2020 has brought more and more biting "cold" to the market.
However, for consumers, the disappearance of the dividend of the mobile phone industry is not an absolute bad thing, because the pressure of the market has also forced smartphone manufacturers to create more competitive products. This can be seen from the charging power of mobile phones, and in 2022, 100 watts and 200 watts charging power are common. This may also indicate that we will see smartphones with higher charging power in the future.
Fast charging has become a new racing point in the evolution of mobile phones
In fact, since the birth of the iPhone in 2007, battery life has become a major shortcoming of smartphones. In the past two years, with the improvement of mobile phone energy consumption and the stagnation of battery technology progress, battery life has increasingly become a pain point in the smartphone industry.
In order to meet the performance needs of smartphone users, upstream chip manufacturers have been committed to developing powerful processor products. Taking the second-generation Snapdragon 8 mobile platform as an example, which is manufactured using TSMC's 4nm process, Kryo CPU architecture has made bold innovations, adding a new performance core, and the new architecture of 1+2+2+3 has more extreme performance. At the same time, hardware ray tracing technology is provided, and the picture quality of mobile games is significantly improved.
In addition, coupled with the 5G network gradually becoming the standard function of most smartphones, short video products have spawned more and more demand for photography and video recording, and the battery life of mobile phones has been tested.
In the context of the increase in the power consumption of mobile phones, battery technology has not advanced for many years. Since its birth in the nineties, lithium batteries have been the main energy carrier of smartphones for nearly three decades. Since smartphones need to take into account the characteristics of portability, the volume of the battery cannot be increased indefinitely. Therefore, the capacity of 5000mAh has almost become the ceiling of smartphone batteries.
On the one hand, smartphones are consuming more and more energy, and on the other hand, battery technology is difficult to advance. Smartphone manufacturers can only turn their attention to charging speed.
In 2016, OPPO R9 shouted the advertising slogan of "five minutes of charging, two hours of talking" with VOOC flash charging technology, realizing the business myth of 20 million units shipped annually. Since then, fast charging technology has become a major competition point in the evolution of smartphones.
In 2022, the 100-watt charging arms race will be blown
In 2022, in order to bring consumers a differentiated experience, various smartphone manufacturers have launched new mobile phones with record charging power.
At MWC held in early 2022, OPPO released 240W super flash charging technology, which can charge the equivalent 4500mAh battery to 100% in 9 minutes. In addition, OPPO also showed the 150W SUPERVOOC flash charge, which can charge the 4500mAh battery to 50% in 5 minutes. Also at MWC 2022, Realme also demonstrated 150W UltraDart Charge technology and said that a new machine equipped with this technology will be released soon.
If MWC is still suspected of show PPT technology, then with the end of the first quarter, various smartphone manufacturers have launched real high-power charging products, which means that the charging power of more than 100 watts has begun to accelerate.
For example, on March 22, 2022, the realme GT Neo3 was officially released, on the basis of only 1999 yuan, equipped with 150W lightspeed second charge, 4500mAh large battery can achieve 50% charging in 5 minutes. Almost at the same time, the Black Shark 5 series was also officially released, equipped with a 4650mAh battery, which also supports more than 100W 120W super flash charging, and can charge to 100% in as fast as 15 minutes.
According to PChome statistics, among the key models in 2022, the charging power is more than 100W, accounting for 29.58%. From this point of view, fast charging has become a big competition point for smartphones in 2022. It is precisely because most mobile phones support high-power charging, among the key models in 2022, the number of models with a charging time of less than 40 minutes has reached 35, accounting for 49.5%.
However, unfortunately, on the basis of the rapid improvement of domestic smartphone charging power, international manufacturers are not enterprising. In the data of PChome statistics, iPhone 14 Pro Max and Samsung Galaxy Z Flip4 ranked first and second from the bottom respectively, with charging power of 27W and 25W respectively, and the total charging time was about 2 hours.
Charging power or peak in 2023
Although it has reached more than 100 watts, and the charging time can even be controlled in about 10 minutes, the charging power of smartphones does not seem to have reached the end.
On January 5, 2022, realme released a 240W full-level second charge, which can charge a mobile phone with an equivalent 4500mAh battery to 100% in just 9 minutes. It is understood that the technology will be released in the realme GT Neo5, which will be released in Q1 2022.
Unfortunately, 240W may be the ceiling of smartphone charging at this stage, because the Type-C interface is difficult to support higher charging power. In mid-2021, the USB-IF Association released a new fast charging standard, USB PD3.1. The new standard adds an extended power range (EPR), which allows chargers to charge from 3.0 up to 100W to 240W. That's why realme releases a 240W full-level second charge instead of 250W or 260W.
On the other hand, with the increase of charging power, it has become difficult to directly proportional the investment cost of technology to the improvement of the experience obtained by consumers.
According to PChome's test, although most smartphones support more than 100-watt fast charging, in order to control the temperature and protect the battery, these phones can only maintain the highest power for a period of time when actually charging. As the charging power of mobile phones becomes higher and higher, this contradiction will become more and more significant.
In addition, when the fast charging time of smart phones is reduced to less than 30 minutes, the marginal benefits obtained by consumers are also decreasing, and the 9-minute charging time of 240W, compared to 150W of 19-minute charging time, will not open up too much of a gap.
All in all, in the context of shrinking smartphone dividends, smartphone manufacturers in 2022 have started an armament war for charging power. Because of this, we have seen many mobile phones that have broken charging power records.
With the emergence of a ceiling in technology, consumers' pain points have been greatly satisfied, and smartphone manufacturers' investment in charging is also facing the problem of continuous narrowing of marginal benefits. It is foreseeable that in 2023, the development of smart phone charging technology will no longer be blindly rushing high, but will be "down", in the middle and low-end products for the popularization of fast charging technology.