What you need to know
- OnePlus has officially announced its new Optimized Charging feature.
- Using Optimized Charging will help extend the life of your phone by slowing the degradation of the battery.
- There is no word on when it will begin rolling out to OnePlus phones, but it is currently being beta tested.
Back in December, we reported on a new feature in the OxygenOS beta called "Optimized Charging." At the time, the release notes gave little information on what it was, other than it would "improve battery performance based on usage."
However, OnePlus has now officially announced the feature and given us some more details on how it will improve the performance of your battery. It all comes down to the battery tech in our devices and how it degrades over time. One of the best practices to slow the degradation of your battery is to limit the time your phone sits charging at 100%.
The problem is, most of us charge up overnight and we can't be there to unplug our phone as soon as it reaches a full charge. To get around this, some companies are introducing software features to help. Most notably, Apple included an optimized charging feature with the release of iOS 13.
OnePlus has now announced its very own version of Optimized Charging which should help extend the life of your phone. When enabled, Optimized Charging will charge your phone up to 80% and then stop. The feature will then wait to finish charging your phone until 100 minutes before you are expected to pick it up.
How does the phone know when you're going to pick it up? To do that, OnePlus will first use some cues to predict when you'll unplug your phone, such as the daily wake-up time, first alarm, or first event. Over time, OnePlus says the phone will learn your patterns and it hopes to improve the technology further by accounting for time zone changes when traveling or waking up later on the weekends.
The new setting for Optimized Charging can be found in settings under the battery menu. When in use, a muted notification will also appear allowing you to bypass it and charge up to 100% if you choose.
There was no word on when the feature will begin rolling out to OnePlus phones, but hopefully it will be hitting phones soon after being in beta for almost a month now.
