OnePlus 8 Series officially confirmed to pack wireless charging as fast charger leaks

Ben Schoon | Apr 7 2020 - 6:45 am PT

It’s been a long time coming. After years of excuses, OnePlus has officially confirmed that it will be adopting wireless charging in the OnePlus 8 series. Here’s what you need to know.

In an interview with the Verge and an official tweet, OnePlus has confirmed beyond the shadow of a doubt that the OnePlus 8 Pro will offer wireless charging. What does that mean about the regular OnePlus 8? We don’t officially know, but it seems very possible it won’t offer the feature at all.

So, was OnePlus’ extensive wait for this feature worthwhile? According to Pete Lau himself, the OnePlus 8 Pro’s wireless charging feature will be able to hit speeds of 30W, significantly faster than the 7-15W we find in devices from Apple, Google, and Samsung.

With that jump in speed, OnePlus claims this wireless charging system can power up a OnePlus 8 Pro from 0% to 50% in 30 minutes.

OnePlus is able to achieve these faster speeds by operating with a proprietary, Qi-based standard. Using the company’s own charger, the OnePlus 8 Pro will be able to hit 30W while, on other chargers, it will be capable of normal Qi speeds (up to 10W). As a result of that, though, OnePlus’ official charger will apparently be “certainly higher than what we could expect for most traditional Qi chargers,” but Lau says that “we’ve done what we can to make the price of the charger as reasonable as possible.”

For the first time ever, our industry-leading Warp Charge technology is going wireless on the #OnePlus8Series.

— OnePlus (@oneplus) April 7, 2020

Lau also mentioned in his interview that, before now, the reason OnePlus didn’t adopt wireless charging was speed. But by fixing that, another arises in heat. To solve that, the company has put a powerful fan on its wireless charger to keep the phone cool. At night, though, when you’re trying to sleep, the charger will slow down speeds, and as a result, cut down on fan noise.

OnePlus calls its system “Warp Charge 30 Wireless,” and apparently, it uses 20V at 1.5A to achieve 30W speeds while using “isolated charge pumps” inside the phone to reduce the voltage down to something that can safely charge the battery, as detailed in the graphic below.

So, what does this new charger look like? Thanks to Evan Blass, we’ve got some images of the charger including the image at the top of this article. At a glance, the charger has a clear spot for the fan and doesn’t appear to use USB-C for power. It should be interesting to see this one in person.