You need a better charger
Something I noticed recently while after reviewing several Qualcomm Quick Charge 2.0 chargers is that I’m almost never out of juice anymore. This isn’t a Qualcomm specific thing as a note, it’s a two plus amp thing. If your device charges at two amps or higher, you already know that smug feeling of a quickly charged phone.
With my old chargers it was a fight to keep the battery level maintained with the speed at which I drained the phone. I can kill 3000mAh of juice in a couple of hours if you get me started, and with a charge rate of less than one amp this meant I was either tethered to a charger or I had a dead phone.
For a while in the EVO days I was using roughly six complete charges a day worth of juice as I rooted, flashed, tested out this app and that. I had batteries lined up to swap out, and would deplete them with vigor.
I noticed a Motorola advertisement on TV recently that said all you needed was 15 minutes for eight more hours of use and realized those are the same chargers I’ve been reviewing. 15 minutes will get you at least an additional 500mAh to use (more like 650mAh) and that can last the average phone on average use six to eight hours.
But that’s not a Motorola specific thing. They’re marketing it, but anyone who can charge at two amps and up already has this (you can smirk now iPhone users). Motorola uses the Qualcomm Quick Charge 2.0 specs, so does my HTC One M9, and my One M8, and probably the One M7 and EVO 4G LTE. I believe other manufacturers have their own specs, but let’s just say it’s a two amp thing.
I got in my car to go to work today, I’d been out in the morning (pre-baby stuff,) and had wasted a lot of battery running around and contributing active data to Sensorly (got a comparison map coming up of what a carrier claims for coverage and what really is,) and was down to 58% battery left at noon. This is a morning of non-stop usage as a note, the M9 has a better battery than that.
I plugged the phone into a Ventev Quick Charge 2.0 car charger (I think,) which seems to top out at a positive 1.9mA in my situation (got a lot of stuff running.) I forgot to review that car charger… it’s great as a note, and drove the 16 minutes or so to work. When I got the phone off the charger, it’s at 74%.
So yeah, do yourself a favor and get one higher speed wall or car charger that works with your phone. I can’t imagine going back to being tethered to a wall for any length of time. I generally don’t use portable battery chargers any more because 10 minutes in the car and I’ve got several hours of at least passive phone use charged up.
Now if I can locate a portable Qualcomm Quick Charge 2.0 battery pack, I might start carrying again, but tethering a phone to a battery pack just feels like we’re going back to house phones.
