USB-C Port and Universal Charging

Last year, the European Union decided to impose the USB-C port from December 28, 2024 on many categories of electronic devices, including smartphones. This new legislation should make it possible to avoid headaches for consumers, who sometimes have to juggle between chargers and cables in order to recharge their terminals.

The target is, of course, Apple, which equips its iPhones with a proprietary Lightning port that is incompatible with other standards, and that is what the European Union wants to fight. The EU believes that this decision will contribute to the existence of a universal charger capable of charging all our devices, which would be good news for the environment and for users (both from a practical and economic point of view). But it is not certain that we will soon find ourselves using only one charger. Because even making USB-C mandatory, the experiences will be far from unified.

And this was demonstrated by the folks at DXOMARK, which has a test protocol for loading. The results of their tests are clear: although they all rely on USB-C, smartphones benefit from very different charging performance depending on the charging technologies used.

In other words, to take advantage of all the capabilities of our smartphones, you almost always need to use your branded charger. For example, the Xiaomi 12T Pro is announced by the manufacturer with a charging power of 120W. DXOMARK managed a peak of 105W with the original charger, but stayed at 22W using the Pixel 6, 19W with the OPPO Find X5 charger and 16W with the Galaxy S22 Ultra charger.

Chargers designed by smartphone manufacturers are only developed to provide the best performance for their branded devices. Also, chargers from third-party manufacturers such as Belkin or Anker cannot keep up with original chargers either. To really enjoy the charging experience communicated by the manufacturers, we can forget about the universal charger fantasy.

USB-C Port and Universal Charging

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