MWC 2023: Charge at lightning speed: the Realme GT3 sets the speed record

Yes, it’s real. The Realme GT3 was announced at the MWC 2023 in Barcelona and is especially suited for those impatient ones to whom “fast charging” means nothing. This phone has 240W SuperVOOC charging. In case you were wondering, SuperVOOC is a technology for fast charging from OPPO, which is also licensed to Realme and others.

VOOC stands for Voltage Open Loop Multi-step Constant-Current Charging (looks like they took a bit of an artistic license with the acronym), and the fastest implementation is 240W, which the Realme GT3 has. It allows the 4,600 mAh battery to be fully charged in nine and a half minutes.

According to Realme, this is the highest possible charging speed for USB-C. However, Redmi is currently developing a new 300W fast-charging tech that would supposedly beat Realme. As of now, it’s just a proof of concept.

Yes, it’s fast. But nominally, other phones have achieved such feats, too. For instance, the Redmi Note 12 Discovery Edition has 210W fast charging, and it could charge its battery in about nine minutes. However, the battery was a bit smaller with 4,300 mAh. The OnePlus 10T can charge its 4,800 mAh in less than 20 minutes.

All this is very nice but what about when you can’t even spend nine minutes charging your phone? The company points out that a measly 30-second charge allows you 40 minutes of video streaming, two hours worth of calls, and three hours of music listening.

With such high performance (and wattage) when charging, thinking about the battery it’s a bit worrisome. After all, we all know how some phones tend to explode. Even when 240W can get phones pretty hot, Realme indicated that the GT3’s battery still delivers 80 percent of its capacity after 1,600 charging cycles.

It’s the same performance that Oppo offers but with 150W, and more than the 1,000 charging cycles that the EU is considering demanding as a minimum. They achieved this by enabling certain features, such as restricting the maximum charge to 80 percent when it’s charged overnight and placing the three charging chipsets at a distance to minimize heat.

Fast charging is not all you can look forward to when it comes to the Realme GT3. It has an RGB rectangle on the back called “Pulse Interface”, which changes colors to indicate different situations, such as low charge, visual cues for the camera timer, or notifications for incoming calls.

Whereas these two features look interesting enough, the rest is good but not groundbreaking. It was released in China under the name GT Neo 5, offering a Snapdragon 8 Plus Gen 1, a 6.74-inch 144Hz 1240p display, and three rear cameras with a 50MP one. The GT3 version is very likely to offer the same and will cost $649 for the base version with 8 GB and 128 GB.

If you’re interested, bear in mind it’ll be available in May or June, and the GT Neo 5 offers the SuperVOOC feature on its top-tier version only, that is, 16 GB of RAM and 256 GB of storage.

Realme GT3 Is All About Fast Charging. But How Fast?