Xiaomi demos HyperCharge: fully juice a 4,000mAh battery in just 8 minutes

Forward-looking: If charging phones were a drag race, Xiaomi wants to make it known that it has the quickest quarter-miler at its disposal. The company’s recently demoed HyperCharge feature has laid claim to being the world’s fastest wired and wireless charging technology. With a 4,000mAh battery inside a modified Mi 11 Pro, HyperCharge was able to fully top it up in 8 minutes using 200W wired charging and achieved the same feat in 15 minutes using 120W wireless charging.

Long-lasting batteries sound like a pipedream to the smartphone industry, where manufacturers seem committed more than ever to deliver fast, convenient ways of charging devices, throwing more capacity or developing algorithms for controlling battery degradation. Xiaomi has frequently made headlines for its charging technology, sometimes with bold but seemingly wishful claims and sometimes actually succeeding where others have failed.

The company’s latest HyperCharge demo appears to be an iteration of the 80W wireless charging tech we saw last year. The latter was able to achieve a 50 percent charge for a 4,000mAh battery in just over 8 minutes and reached a full charge in 19 minutes. The new tech with an increased wireless power output of 120W improves on those figures slightly, resulting in a 50 percent charge in 7 minutes and a full charge in 15 minutes.

What’s more impressive, though, is the 200W wired mode. This allows the modified Mi 11 Pro to race past 10 percent charge in 44 seconds, reach 50 percent in 3 minutes, and fully charge in just 8 minutes. HyperCharge with big batteries sounds like a match made in heaven as a 4,000mAh battery is a fairly large unit that can typically power through multiple days for normal users and can even last a whole day under heavy use cases such as gaming and navigation.

However, thermals and battery degradation remain a concern. Xiaomi has not revealed when (or if) it will ship this new technology, but it’ll likely have those two factors sorted out by the time HyperCharge hits the consumer market.