A 4,000mAh BATTERY THAT CHARGES IN AROUND HALF AN HOUR: The fastest fast charging Oppo’s Reno Ace

Oppo announced its latest flagship phone last month, the Reno Ace, with a headline feature of the world’s fastest fast-charge solution yet. Oppo’s 65W SuperVOOC 2.0 fast charger is claimed to be able to charge the Reno Ace’s 4,000mAh battery in half an hour, which would put it ahead of all other competing technology on the market.

I have the Reno Ace in hand now, and I can confirm that it is indeed the fastest-charging phone available — although not quite as fast as Oppo’s claims.

Two minutes and 39 seconds after plugging the Reno Ace in, the screen turned on to indicate a one-percent charge. Here’s how it went over the next half-hour:

5 mins: 10 percent

10 mins: 37 percent

15 mins: 57 percent

20 mins: 76 percent

25 mins: 92 percent

28 mins: 98 percent

29 mins: 99 percent

30 mins: 99 percent

So no, it didn’t quite get a full charge in half an hour — but it was still pretty dang fast. The phone eventually hit the 100-percent mark at 31 minutes and 31 seconds, so it’s certainly still in the ballpark, and possibly within the margin of error for battery percentage readouts. For comparison, the iPhone 11’s significantly smaller battery only gets around half full in the same amount of time when using Apple’s 18W USB-C charger.

Fast-charging tech is a particular obsession of Oppo’s. The phone overthrown by the Reno Ace is the same company’s Find X Lamborghini, which I found filled its 3,400mAh battery in 35 minutes. Super VOOC uses a dual-cell design to allow the battery to reach optimum charging speeds at high currents without overheating. The Reno Ace did get warm while I charged it, but not unusually so. The 65W charger is also impressively small thanks to the use of gallium nitride.

Otherwise, the Reno Ace is a pretty standard flagship phone that shares a lot in common with the very good OnePlus7T. Both phones have a Snapdragon 855 Plus processor, a 20:9 6.5-inch 1080p display with a small notch and a fast 90Hz refresh rate, and a 48-megapixel main camera with Sony’s IMX586 sensor. The Reno Ace is cheaper, though, starting at 2,999 yuan (~$420) in China for a model with 8GB of RAM and 128GB of storage.

Oppo’s most direct competition, ironically enough, now comes from Realme — a company under the same BBK umbrella and which started out as an Oppo sub-brand. The new Realme X2 Pro has a near-identical industrial design, software, and specification, except it, has a 64-megapixel camera, an extra macro lens, and a slightly slower 50W Super VOOC charging. It undercuts the Reno Ace by 300 yuan ($43) for the entry-level model with 6GB of RAM and 64GB of storage, with the equivalent 8GB/128GB version still coming in at 100 yuan ($14) cheaper for a phone that you might well prefer.

In any case, either phone would be a bargain in the much less competitive US marketplace, and the Reno Ace shows Oppo continuing to push its fast-charging tech-forward. At least it might show up in a stateside OnePlus phone someday.