Smartphones with quick charge: fastest to recharge from 0 to 100% (2015 edition)

With emerging quick charging technologies from various companies, it's time to see who's who when it comes to getting your smartphone battery fully juiced up from 0 to 100% fastest.

But first, let's give some brief historical perspective to the charging debate. Qualcomm was the first to open the field of quick charging on smartphones with its QuickCharge 1.0 technology which utilized efficient switchmode conversion that maximizes the 10 watts of power available to be drawn from USB. 

This first generation of the technology was designed to reduce charging times by up to 40% compared to regular charging techniques, and was available in phones as old as 2012.

Next, we saw the arrival of Qualcomm's QuickCharge 2.0, first available on most Snapdragon 800 devices. Support for the technology was there, but phone makers decided to save up on chargers, so a lot of phones ended up with slower chargers leaving users confused whether they even support QuickCharge 2.0 (the same confusion basically continues to this day, but we'll right this wrong with this article).

Then, a couple of other newcomers entered the space. Chinese Oppo introduced its VOOC chargers with the Find 7 smartphone, and it was a particularly surprising solution as the charging rate on the bulky VOOC wall charger showed rates of 4.5 amps, much more than all the rest smartphones and even tablets at the same 5 volts of electric potential. Oppo's engineers later explained that the secret sauce consists of three parts: a new type of a USB connector with 7 pins rather than the regular four (capable of delivering more electrical power), a battery with more pins and the battery cell actually consisting of three cells that are each charging simultaneously at 1.5A. No matter the technology, the effect was staggering: the Oppo Find 7 charged faster than any other phone we've ever tested without a danger to the battery going bust quicker than any other cell charged with 5V/1.5A. The Oppo Find 7 takes just 1 hours and 22 minutes to recharge.

Finally, just a month ago, Samsung brought us the Galaxy S6 with its 'Fast Adaptive Charging' tech, and the phone broke all earlier records, even that of Oppo's VOOC charging. The Galaxy S6 takes just around 78 minutes, or 1 hour and 18 minutes, to go from fully drained to fully charged. Samsung's Fast Adaptive Charging tech actually first launched on the Note 4, but since the phablet ships with a much larger battery the effect was not all that obvious.

With all that in mind, let's take a look at the phones that are fastest to get fully recharged, from 0% to 100%, with the fastest ones coming first.

Charge time (0% to 100%): 1 hour 18 minutes

Wall charger: 9V - 1.2A | 5V - 2A

Battery Capacity: 2550mAh

Battery life: 7 hours 14 minutes

The Galaxy S6 charges remarkably quickly using the provided 'Fast Adaptive Charge' technology, which Samsung has developed to be even faster than Qualcomm's ubiquitous QuickCharge 2.0 tech.