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I think this is probably a bit basic, but I've tried googling and have posted elsewhere.

The question is vey simple. I've recently bought a new smartphone, with a standard lithium battery. Every other lithium battery device I have had charges in stages. They go quite quickly up to 80%, and then really slowly for the last 20%. This new one, however, charges in a completely linear fashion. Every 1% of charge takes about 1 min 30 seconds, all the way from low charge to 100%.

I've read that the stepped charging pattern, which I've always seen before, is for safety and to protect the battery. Is the way my new phone charges normal these days, or could there be something wrong?

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  • \$\begingroup\$ Slower charging does extend battery life. \$\endgroup\$
    – Andy aka
    Oct 23, 2022 at 13:56
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    \$\begingroup\$ It is up to the phone and it's battery subsystem how they want to display battery state of charge. You don't know the relation between what percentage the battery meter application shows and how the battery is actually charged. \$\endgroup\$
    – Justme
    Oct 23, 2022 at 14:00
  • \$\begingroup\$ Either they dare to speed though the absorption process by raising the voltage or they do a software feature to not have a correct voltage-to-SOC lookup table but rather skew it at the end to make it appear linear to the user. \$\endgroup\$
    – winny
    Oct 23, 2022 at 14:21
  • \$\begingroup\$ The charger with the very simple charging display shows battery voltage. When the voltage soon reaches 4.2V then its shows 100% which is wrong (It is actually about 75%). The linear charger properly calculates the charging times. \$\endgroup\$
    – Audioguru
    Oct 23, 2022 at 14:54

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It sounds as though the user feedback said it would be better if the charging information was linear so you can easily answer "how long do I need to charge".

You could consider experimenting with discharge: when it says 100% does the batter last twice as long as when it says 50%?

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