120W charging on the 11T Pro will not degrade battery health, says Xiaomi

Xiaomi has been working on stepping up the charging game for a while now, even before its HyperCharge technology introduced back in May made headlines with its 200 Watt charging rate, which could charge a 4,000mAh battery in 15 minutes flat. 

Now that we know for sure that the Chinese company's latest flagship series' top model (the 11T Pro) will feature 120W wired charging, many potential buyers have been asking themselves the real question: "But at what cost?"

Naturally, charging a phone battery at such speeds is expected to result in quicker degradation of battery life cycles, making it questionable whether it's worth it in the end. And people have been wanting to know, with the Xiaomi 11T series set to launch on September 15th next week, just a day after the Apple iPhone 13 launch. 

Xiaomi has just shed some insight on this question (to a degree) when the Xiaomi Head of Communications, Daniel Desjarlais, spoke out in an interview recently with The Verge.

Desjarlais held that the good far outweighs the bad in this case, and the electrical design made sure the battery life did not degrade significantly more than other modern smartphones.

“It’s like having two different inlets to fill the gas in your car and two separate tanks,” he said. 

“Now, rather than filling at a certain slow rate on one side, you can fill up two at the same time. This is all done on the side of the phone, the charger outputs 120 watts and rather than trying to push the maximum of five volts, a single channel splits it into two, three, four channels. This allows us to increase everything — everything is done at 20 amperes.”

After 800 charging cycles (that's roughly two years), Xiaomi promises a retention of 80% capacity, which isn't too shabby at all. The iPhone 12 series, for comparison, guarantees up to 80% battery health after only 500 charging cycles. 

We'll have to wait and see after another few weeks whether Xiaomi will make good on their word, as they've previously said that their other 125W charging solution also only brings a phone to 80% after 800 cycles.