 Cell phone chargers, they're all basically the same, right? You plug it into the wall, you throw a USB cable on it, then you plug it into the lightning or micro USB or whatever other connector there is on your phone, and call it a day. Or night, if you charge your devices at night, which would make sense, because, well, look, never mind that. The point is, easy, right? Wrong! And you know what else is wrong? Teasing upcoming videos like part five of Whole Room Water Cooling, when realistically, they're at least two weeks out. And yet I'd do it anyway. Cooler Master's Case Mod World Series is your opportunity to show off your modding skills and win great prizes. Entries close February 7th, 2015. Click now to learn more. So, four years ago, life was relatively simple, at least as far as 5V chargers for phones and tablets went. You had your USB ports on your computer, or very low-end wall warts that output 500 milliamps, the typical ones and the ones bundled with your phones, which are usually one amp-ish, and premium aftermarket ones and the bundled ones with tablets, which were usually two or 2.1 amps. Now, even in those days, though, you sometimes needed interoperability between your charger and the device being charged in order to take advantage of the best possible charging rates, because beefier componentry is required to prevent the device and or its battery from being damaged by the charging process. So phone manufacturers like Apple and Samsung used little signaling tricks that would allow their chargers to communicate with their devices to let them know, hey, it's okay to draw more power. Fast forward to 2012 and the introduction of Qualcomm Quick Charge 1.0, an attempt to standardize faster charging so more customers could leverage it, at least those customers whose phones contained Qualcomm processors. Version 1.0 was all about optimizing charge times with 5-volt 2-amp adapters that you already owned with a fancy power management IC built into the device itself. All the user needed to know was that his or her gadget was charging faster, especially when it was very low. Version 2.0, which started showing up in devices like the HTC One M8 in early 2014, takes the on-device hardware a step further and allows it to accept up to 3 amps from a 5-volt power supply and even other voltages as well, up to 12 volts. But the tricky thing is that while both the devices and the chargers are backwards compatible with older lower power ones, to take full advantage of Quick Charge 2.0, we need drastically different power sources that can deliver the aforementioned greater current and varying voltages. So, if you want to be sure it supports Quick Charge 2.0, check the box. It'll say Quick Charge 2.0 and it'll come with a pretty steep price tag for a freaking wall wart. So the question then is, is it worth the investment? Well, Qualcomm claims that compared to conventional charging, so 5-volt 1-amp, Quick Charge 2.0 can fill your battery up to 5 times more in the same time. And even compared to Quick Charge 1.0, it's twice as fast. But their results, while surely very scientific, were done on a bare battery, as far as I can tell, and therefore might not really reflect exactly the results we'll see in the real world. So I brought this test to the real-world suckers. I used a Nexus 6 from Google manufactured by Motorola and tested it in four different scenarios. First, with an Apple 1-amp charger that I've had since I got my iPhone 4. Second, with a 2-amp wall wart that I got with the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1. Third, with the Quick Charge 2.0 charger included in the Nexus 6's box. And finally, with a third-party Quick Charge 2.0 charger from Puregear to see if the rated current at the various charging voltages makes a difference on this device anyway, since they're actually a touch lower than Motorola's bundled turbocharger. Maybe that contributes to Puregear's smaller size as well, actually. Now, before beginning, I needed a testing methodology. Obviously, I couldn't just power down the phone and plug it in and stare at it until it was finished. So here's what I did. I ran a 3D game with the flashlight on to drain the battery until the phone powered off. Then I plugged it in briefly, powered it back on, and let it sit at the home screen until it reached 3%. Any lower and it would shut down again. I put it in airplane mode and closed all apps except for Battery Monitor widget, which I configured to pull the battery level once every minute. Because a big part of the benefit of Quick Charge is not necessarily the overall charge time to 100%, but rather the charge time to go from empty to a reasonable level when you're desperate. And we need more plot points than just start and end in order to get that. So to ensure we were getting the best possible experience, a one-foot Micro-B USB cable was used since the cable length can have an impact on charging power. And I ended up with the graph that you see here. Each charge test was run twice to ensure that nothing weird happened. So I consider these results accurate to within plus or minus a few percent. And overall, I learned a few things. Number one, Quick Charge 2.0 is faster than other solutions. Number two, most 2-amp chargers out there, you can see I have quite a few of them here, are either incapable of handshaking with many devices and enabling faster charging rates, or they just plain suck. Most of them topped out around 1.5 amps. Number three, all the 1-amp chargers I have lying around deliver more than 1 amp, including the Apple one that I used for my benchmarks, which was the closest to 1 amp out of the bunch. And number four, thanks to Qualcomm standardizing this stuff, a third-party Quick Charge 2.0 charger will deliver basically the same results as a first-party one, something that hasn't always been the case in the past with proprietary standards. So cool beans. Faster charging is good, right? I mean, it's not quite as fast as I was hoping, but it's definitely faster. Actually, not always. It's great if your phone is almost dead and you've got a blind date in half an hour, and you need to make sure you can, you know, text your friends from the dinner table if it's not going well, or if it is going well, oh, he's so wonderful. But juicing up your battery with a higher current charger generates more heat, which can negatively impact the battery's overall lifespan, how many charge and discharge cycles it can handle. And given that so many batteries are non-replaceable these days, this is a bit of a concern. So whenever you're plugging in for the night, even though you have support for Quick Charge 2.0, I'd recommend sticking with a low-speed charger. So thanks for watching, guys. Like this video if you liked it, dislike it if you thought it sucked, leave a comment if your feelings are more complicated than this. Let me know what were you expecting out of all of this? Do genuinely want to read your comments. 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