Crazy Phone ‘Explorer Edition’ Charges 10x Faster Than Galaxy S22 or iPhone 14: We Test World’s Fastest 210W Charging

Some companies like to keep things secure to the point of boring, while others are willing to push the envelope and experiment with crazy new features, and this might be the craziest we’ve tested recently.

That phone is the Redmi Note 12 Explorer Edition, a $400 midrange that not only has a charger included in the box for free, but that charger is far superior to the ones other companies ask you to pay for. The charger itself looks more like a laptop charger, it’s about the size and weight of two regular phone chargers, and it has a USB-C port. Besides his larger size, he looks surprisingly ordinary considering his clearly extraordinary abilities.

It can deliver an incredible 210 watts of power to your phone, charging its battery in nine minutes. Yes, we said “nine”, not “ninety”, and not even “nineteen”!

Of course, we had to get hands-on with the Redmi Note 12 Explorer and we started with our own test!

• in 3 minutes — 38% charge
• in 5 minutes — 58% charge
• in 9 minutes — 86%
• Full charge took less than 15 minutes

It’s also interesting to see how the last percentage point took almost a minute to fill up, confirming that charging does indeed slow down towards the end of the cycle.

The trick is that most companies use bigger chargers with special chips, so most of the heat dissipation happens on the charger and not on the phone, which avoids damaging the battery of the telephone. Some additional techniques are also used, but the end result is that a battery is still designed to live well beyond the typical 500 charge cycles that are usually given as standard. So the cliché is actually wrong. Fast charging doesn’t actually degrade the battery faster, at least according to this official data.

As for this particular Redmi Note 12 Explorer, it uses a GaN charger, which stands for gallium nitride and is a fancy new material that makes those charger speeds and sizes possible. Closer examination reveals that it can deliver 20 volts and 10.5 amps of current, so multiply those two numbers and you get the total power delivery capability of 210 watts.

Ultimately, this technology is really exciting and we think Xiaomi is actually underselling it. why not call it “Magic Charge” or something a little fancier to show the world that you own this advanced new technology!

Redmi Note 12 Explorer: a solid phone at $400

It’s a fairly standard slab of a smartphone with a 6.7-inch 1080p OLED display and a high-end MediaTek chip inside, but it also has some cool new tech in the form of a main camera. of 200 megapixels which promises exceptional image and video quality. And here’s a quick rundown of the specs.

• Dimensions 162.9 x 76 x 9mm, weight 207.5g
• MediaTek Dimensity 1080 processor
• 8GB RAM, 256GB UFS 2.2 storage
• 200MP main camera + 8MP ultra-wide + 2MP macro
• 4300mAh battery
• 210W wired charging
• Android 12 with MIUI 13

For those wondering about this camera, the real benefit of a 200 megapixel camera is actually not resolution per se, but something called pixel binning. Basically, Xiaomi combines 16 pixels into one super pixel and this way it has much more information and can achieve a very clean look with little noise in the dark. It’s a nifty trick and something the new Galaxy S23 Ultra should use as well.

And the Note 12 Explorer’s main camera does a pretty good job. Still, it’s still not quite a camera phone, and you can really tell when using the ultra-wide camera for example with its poor quality.

For everything else, this Xiaomi Redmi Note 12 Explorer Edition is just a solid mid-range at $400. The MediaTek 1080 chip inside is actually faster than most other phones in this price range, you get 8GB of RAM which is even more than most phones at this price, and you even get 256 GB of built-in storage.

But it’s these new technologies that really impress. It’s a teaser for the future when a flagship phone can also charge in around 10 minutes. We think it’s really transformative, it changes the way you use your phone and it helps to know that the battery won’t degrade any faster because of it.

So what do you think of this technology? Would you pay to have a phone that fully charges in just 10 minutes? How important is it to you?