OnePlus 8T secret weapon has Samsung Galaxy Note 20 in its sights

Yes, the OnePlus 8 Pro is only just out, and yes it has just won Best Phone and Gadget of the Year at the T3 Awards 2020, but the Chinese company is already wondering how it can make the OnePlus 8T a worthy upgrade when it lands later this year.

And according to a new report from XDA Developers, the answer may lie in the way it charges.

Developers digging into the code of the freshly released Android 11 beta for OnePlus 8 have found references to 65W Super Warp changing for the OnePlus 8T. That’s more than double the wattage of the 30W currently supported by existing OnePlus handsets and significantly faster than the 45W charging tech slated to come in the Samsung Galaxy Note 20.

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A 65-watt charger is pretty much unheard of amongst smartphones, even flagships. For comparison’s sake, the Samsung Galaxy S20 supports up to 45-watt charging, but crucially only ships with a 25W charger. As we noted above, the upcoming Samsung Galaxy Note 20 is expected to follow suit.

What does a 65W charger mean in practice? Well, the best comparison I’ve personally used is the Oppo RX17 Pro, which ships with a 50-watt charger. That was pretty impressive, going from zero to 42% charge in ten minutes, and then hitting 100% in under 38 minutes.

In theory the OnePlus 8T should be even faster, then – although it’s worth noting that the Oppo handset achieved its superhuman charge speeds in part via having two separate 1,850mAh batteries.

Even if the OnePlus 8T can’t quite match these speeds, it should still be very impressive. Hopefully the company will ship a 65W charger in the box, otherwise for most people the increase in charging speed will be purely theoretical.

Regardless, we’re expecting the OnePlus 8T to otherwise be an iterative update on the already excellent OnePlus 8. That means it’ll likely have the Qualcomm Snapdragon 865 Plus processor, 8- to 12GB RAM, 5G connectivity and improved cameras. Expect it to arrive sometime in the fall, if past form is anything to go by – though the ongoing pandemic may have something to say about that, of course...

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