Some of us don’t think too much about how long it takes to charge our phones; so long as you can get through a day of usage without running your battery down, there’s plenty of time overnight to top your battery off and leave you ready to face the next day. On the other hand, if you’re a smartphone-using-fiend and need to refresh your battery mid-day, being able to charge your phone quickly could be a godsend. If that’s the boat you find yourself in, you should love this news from Qualcomm, which today announced a new high-speed charging system.

Qualcomm’s Quick Charge 2.0 follows last year’s introduction of the 1.0 system, and can deliver up to 60 watts of power to devices implementing it. To get its full benefits, you’ll need both a compatible phone and charger. The company says that using those together can reduce a seven-hour tablet charge time down to three hours. Quick Charge 2.0 will be integrated in devices using the company’s new Snapdragon 800 SoC, and will be available via an optional chip in other models.

In addition to that, Qualcomm’s revealed another Snapdragon 800 feature it’s calling Snapdragon Voice Activation. The idea is that it can implement a very low-power voice recognition system that can run in standby mode, such that instead of waking up your phone by hitting a button or swiping the screen like on BlackBerry 10, you could just say “wake up,” and it would. That might sound a little gimmicky, but we can see where it might find uses: maybe you could say “camera” to simultaneously wake up the phone and bring up its camera to help you take a quick snapshot before the moment’s passed.

Source: Qualcomm 1,2
Via: PhoneScoop