Wireless charging was first seen in a smartphone in 2012 but it's in the last couple of years that it's become really popular. While it may not have taken off in the way many expected it to — it's still largely restricted to flagship smartphones, and in some cases not even there[1] — it's hard to argue against the convenience of just placing your smartphone on a surface and have it charge without the need of plugging in additional cables.
The important thing to note about wireless charging is that it's still very much in its nascent stage. The speeds are slow at best, and there's a lot of fine print that you need need to look at when comparing various chargers. What's more, the experience you get will vary quite a bit from one smartphone to the other, as was underlined during the course of this story.
We spent a few weeks testing 8 different wireless chargers over 80 charge-discharge cycles, using them to charge a Huawei Mate 20 Pro[2] and an iPhone XR[3]. Since most of these wireless chargers don't come with bundled power adapters, we connected them to different types of power sources to see the kind of impact that had on their performance.
Here's everything that we learnt during our extended testing process, but before we get to that, here's a little bit of background on the wireless charging standard itself and everything else you need to keep in mind before buying a wireless charger.
The Qi wireless charging standard
Practically all smartphones that support wireless charging do so via the Qi (pronounced ‘Chee') standard. It's been the choice of smartphone makers ever since the Lumia 820[4] and...