Samsung’s latest smartphones are finally here and with a few tweaks to the build size and weight — plus the addition of a new ultrawide camera in the Galaxy S25 Ultra — they represent some of the most polished smartphones that Samsung has ever made.
Yet, they also follow the same mold of Samsung’s previous smartphones and have launched amid a backdrop of intense competition in the U.S. and abroad. The latest competitor for the Galaxy S25 series in the US was launched by OnePlus just a few weeks ago, and having used the OnePlus 13 series for several weeks, there’s one key feature that I wish Samsung had copied.
The first OnePlus 13 feature that Samsung needs to copy
OnePlus smartphones have always been defined by a focus on great battery life and superfast charging, and the OnePlus 13 is no different. The biggest difference is in the battery capacity, with OnePlus opting to follow sister company Oppo by adopting Silicon Carbon as its battery technology, while Samsung still uses the older lithium-ion battery technology.
Silicon Carbon offers a key benefit over lithium-ion as it allows for a much denser battery of the same size. For comparison, a Lithium-Ion battery at 5,100mAh would be the same size and thickness as a Silicon-Carbon battery at 5,450mAh. This is at full voltage, but when it drops to 3.5V, the silicon-carbon battery would have 240% more capacity remaining compared to the lithium-ion battery.
These numbers sound impressive, but how do they translate into real-world usage? The OnePlus 13 measures 8.5mm thick and weighs 210 grams with a 6,000mAh battery, while the Galaxy S25 Ultra measures 8.2mm thick and weighs 218 grams with a 5,100mAh battery.
In actual usage, I’ve found that the OnePlus 13 delivers approximately two to three hours more screen-on-time, with much longer standby battery life. However, it’s worth noting that I’ve only used the Galaxy S25 Ultra for a few days, and Samsung itself comments that the software optimizations take time to learn your usage patterns to help optimize the overall battery life.
The other OnePlus 13 feature that Samsung needs to finally copy
Whereas the OnePlus 13 represents a shift to new battery technology, it also continues a staple of previous OnePlus smartphones that Samsung has yet to unveil its answer to: superfast charging.
For Samsung users, superfast charging means 45W charging for a small amount of the overall full charge, with the charging speeds getting progressively slower as the battery reaches a full charge. This trend seems to have continued with more recent Samsung phones, with little overall improvement in the three years since.
For example, the Galaxy S22 Ultra sustained peak 45W charging speeds for just a minute and took 62 minutes to charge to full with a 45W charger, and just 70 minutes to charge to full with a 25W charger. The Galaxy S25 Ultra? It has the same battery size and takes about 67 minutes to charge to full when paired with an Anker PowerBank that reveals it’s charging at roughly 40W for a short period of the full charge.
Now consider the OnePlus 13 and OnePlus’s different approach to charging., It features 80W charging in the U.S. when using a 110V power supply, and the same charger offers 100W when connected to a 240V charging supply. This has been a staple of OnePlus phones for years, and the result is that the 6,000mAh battery in the OnePlus 13 takes just 39 minutes to charge to full.
Of course, it’s a bigger battery so what happens when we standardize this down to a single metric? Considering the mAh/minute charging speeds of each of these phones, this is what we get:
- OnePlus 13: 153 mAh / minute
- Galaxy S25 Ultra: 75 mAh / minute
- Galaxy S22 Ultra: 71 mAh / minute
In the three years since the Galaxy S22 Ultra was released, Samsung has improved its overall time taken to charge — using the standardized method above — by 4.4%.
For additional context, consider the OnePlus 10 Pro which was launched a few weeks before the Galaxy S22 Ultra. It features a 5,000mAh battery (that uses Lithium-Ion technology) and takes just 36 minutes to charge to full — using the same 80W charger as the OnePlus 13 — at a rate of 139mAh/minute. In three years, OnePlus has adopted a denser battery and increased its charging speed by about 11%.
It’s not just wired charging that Samsung needs to improve
The OnePlus 50W AirVOOC charger attached to a OnePlus 13The Galaxy S6 and Galaxy S6 Edge helped usher in a new era for smartphones, as although they weren’t the first smartphones to feature wireless or conductive charging, they were the first globally available and widely popular smartphones to do so.
They launched with much aplomb in 2015, and it wasn’t until two years later that Apple unveiled the iPhone 8 which brought Qi charging to the iPhone range. Somewhat surprisingly. Huawei — who helped usher in the current era of telephoto lenses on cameras — took a further two years to bring Qi charging to its phones with the Huawei P30 Pro in 2019, although its limited-edition Porsche Design Mate RS featured it a year earlier.
Wireless charging hasn’t been OnePlus’ strong suit, and while the company has always offered strong fast charging speeds, its flagship phones often didn’t support Qi charging. The OnePlus 13 takes a different approach and while it doesn’t support Qi charging out of the box, you can buy a case that supports both regular wireless charging and magnetic wireless charging (aka MagSafe or Qi2 charging).
Crucially, the OnePlus 13 does this at a higher speed than the wired charging on the Galaxy S25 Ultra. The latter offers a maximum of 45W speeds and takes 67 minutes to charge to full, while the OnePlus 13 is compatible with the new OnePlus 50W Magnetic Wireless Charger. As I covered recently, this takes 75 minutes to charge the OnePlus 13 to full, but when we standardize the charging speeds to account for the difference in sizes, here’s what we get:
- OnePlus 13: 80 mAh / minute
- Galaxy S25 Ultra (wired): 75 mAh / minute
Yes, the OnePlus 13 charges to full at a faster rate wirelessly, than the Galaxy S25 Ultra does when plugged into a charger at the maximum speed.
The Galaxy S25 Ultra is the first Samsung phone to support the Qi2.1 wireless charging standard, although it requires a case to work with a magnetic charger. Without the magnetic charger, it runs at the 15W maximum speeds from the original Qi charging standard, although if it’s like the Galaxy S24 Ultra, it will only do so with the official Samsung wireless charger.
Hey Samsung, it’s time to evolve your charging
Looking at the OnePlus 13 series — and smartphones like the Honor Magic V3 which also feature faster charging than Samsung’s counterparts — one thing is clear: it’s time for Samsung to evolve its charging standards. The company has, rightfully, been somewhat hesitant to do so given its history, but it’s been many years since that fateful launch and its rivals have proven that smartphone batteries are stable enough to support superfast charging.
As we’ve also proven, Samsung is no longer a leader in battery life or charging and instead is slipping behind many competitors. Crucially, its flagship phones will soon be matched by its mid-range phones, with the rumored Galaxy A56 expected to offer the same 45W charging as the Galaxy S25 Ultra.
Let that sink in: the Galaxy A55 costs roughly a third of the Galaxy S24 Ultra, and if the Galaxy A56 continues that trend, it’ll offer the same charging speeds for a fraction of the cost. Hey Samsung, something needs to change and it’s the charging speeds on future flagship phones.
Read the full article here
