SuperVOOC Flash Charging: Everything You Need to Know

In the deluge of tech terms sweeping the smartphone world with every new release, it is getting increasingly harder to decipher what some of them mean. We have already made peace with all the Snapdragons of the world and hundred megapixel triple rear cameras, specifications that are pretty much ubiquitous in modern phones. Yet, at times, looking at the specs list of a new handset, we find ourselves bewildered by an array of new terms. SuperVOOC Flash Charging is one such term, and if you are a China smartphone geek like us, you’ve probably noticed it in the specs list for the latest OPPO Find X2 and wondered, what on earth is this VOOC thing?

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To get to the gist of what VOOC is, we need to take things back a few years. After the first iPhone made large-screen smartphones a new market trend in 2012, and 3G was being gradually replaced by 4G, making way for new applications and technologies, the power consumption of phones soared. The industry focused on expanding battery capacity to solve the issue and ended up with high-capacity batteries that often take over 3 hours to fully charge. If a gadget came with a 8,000 mAh battery and its charging rate was 5V and 1.2A, the charging rate would be lower than the power consumption rate. Solving this problem would dramatically increase charging speeds.

For some time, the mainstream solution within the industry was Qualcomm’s high-voltage and low-current model, until Zhang Jialiang, responsible for hardware R&D at OPPO, took the initiative and decided to do the opposite with his low-voltage and high-current solution that eventually became VOOC flash charging.

The main idea is summarized by OPPO as “charge for 5 minutes, call for 2 hours.” Phones equipped with VOOC super charging can be charged in small bursts. Oppo’s Find X2, for example, fully charges in 38 minutes. Users no longer have to wait for hours, and they are virtually free from worrying about battery life.

Since 2014, when VOOC super charging first debuted in the Find 7, the technology has evolved into a massively marketable product in and off itself. OPPO has applied for more than 1,700 patents worldwide regarding this self-developed flash charging technology, with more than 145 million users worldwide using phones with VOOC super charging.

The technology has gone through some changes over the years, such as increased charging speeds, smaller adaptor sizes, and more, eventually evolving into what is now known as SuperVOOC flash charging, a technology that provides a charging power of nearly 50W and can fully charge a mobile phone with a battery capacity of 3,400 mAh in 35 minutes. On top of that, in October 2019, OPPO’s 30W VOOC flash charging technology went wireless. The latest version of VOOC super charging is the 65W SuperVOOC 2.0 on OPPO’s Find X2, which is the most power ever to be implemented on a mobile phone.