This past week a CNet article headline caught my eye:
We Tested 33 New Phones to See Which Charge Fastest and Crown 2 Winners
Source:
https://www.cnet.com/tech/mobile/cnet-lab-exclusive-fastest-wired-wireless-charging-phone/
I can't say this subject (fastest charging times) is likely to overly influence anyone's phone buying decision but the article is interesting to me in that I'm curious to learn the kind of charging rates many of the most recent phone models are now achieving. I was dismayed, however, to discover that CNet's ranking of the "2 winners" was clearly backwards rendering the remainder of the article's phone rankings suspect.
The issue is that the method of comparison used embraces a fallacy of false equivalence. The article compares percentage charged but ignores battery capacities which effectively robs the percentage charged values of meaning. By the author's logic, attaining a 50% charge on a 4,000 mAh battery is equivalent to attaining a 50% charge on a 5,000 mAh battery. Put another way: a phone charging a 4,000 mAh battery from 0% to 50% in 30 minutes is judged to have "charged as fast as" a phone charging a 5,000 mAh battery from 0% to 50% in 30 minutes. Obviously in this scenario the 5,000 battery phone would have charged 25% more capacity (2500 mAh versus 2000 mAh) in the same 30 minutes and would therefore be considered to have delivered a 25% faster rate of charge.
We could assume that CNet's test intentionally disregarded factoring in battery sizes in favor of taking the view that "100% charged" is considered the same benchmark across phone models based on different phones' design and battery choices. That might be stated something like, "Phone A was designed to have a 4,000 mAh battery, Phone B was designed to have a 5,000 battery, and we are testing to see which can be recharged the fastest as a percentage of each model's own battery capacity."
Judging a phone's charging rate against its own capacity is, however, a terrible basis when purporting to compare the charging rates of dissimilar phone models. That's like judging who "ran the most distance" by measuring how far each runner ended up from the finish line with different runners having different finish lines. If you want to equally compare runners' performances you should be measuring how far each runner ended up from a common starting line. It's a little hard to imagine a "measure each phone only against its own battery capacity" being a thoughtfully-chosen approach for a serious "best charging rate across 33 phones" competition leading to "CNet Lab Awards".
For Your Consideration (Example 1):
If we were to add to our comparison group a 34th phone with a paltry 1,000 mAh battery (let's call it "baby phone") and only half the other phones' collective average charging speed the baby phone would still be almost certain of outperforming the rest of the pack despite having comparatively terrible charging performance. By CNet's measurements baby phone would be considered to outperform both the iPhone 17 Pro and the Samsung S26 Ultra if baby phone achieved only 30% of the S26's charging rate. That's because baby phone's small 1,000 mAh battery would be 100% charged after 30 minutes while the S26's 5,000 mAh battery would only be 76% charged and the iPhone 17 Pro's 4,252 mAh battery only 74% charged.
Example 2: CNet's approach would be like judging who can fill up a liquid fuel tank the fastest and comparing a professional F1 pit crew to someone filling one of those long-stemmed butane candle lighters. An F1 crew with special equipment can achieve a refill rate of 12 liters per second (until F1 banned in-race refueling back in 1984, that is) but the butane lighter fills nearly instantly with just a single squirt. Based on how full by percentage each respective tank ends up after half a second, the lighter with its teeny-tiny fuel reservoir wins every time despite not even being in the same universe as the F1 crew in terms of actual fuel refill rate.
To really compare apples-to-apples in this example the "rate of charge (fuel refill)" must be based on comparing the amount of energy (fluid) transferred. It's almost meaningless to compare how full two tanks are as a percentage of tank capacities while also completely disregarding the different sizes of the tanks being compared.
The article's two top-rated phones are both excellent phones with excellent charging rates. I thought every phone on the list of 33 phones compared was a good-or-great phone model and was a suitable choice for inclusion. The problem is that CNet gives top honors to Apple's iPhone 17 Pro at 64.5% average overall charge (wired % over 30 minutes + wireless % over 30 minutes / 2) with Samsung's Galaxy 26 Ultra a respectable second at 57.5% average overall charge. In reality, though, Samsung outscored Apple with a 5% better actual charge rate per CNet's own numbers -- a 12% swing in favor of the S26 and a reversal of the #1 and #2 spots.
This 5% difference in actual charge rate feels like a whole lot of nitpicking. In the real world that's pretty much a wash with both phones being really great with respect to actual charging rates. I would happily support declaring the top five or six phones (most of which are iPhones) as basically being "equally the best" at fast charging. My issue is not with any of the excellent phones cited in the article but with the article's terribly flawed judging methodology. Which leads me to...
Small Conspiracy Theory of the Week
(This "conspiracy" section is mostly just for fun. I don't wear tin-foil hats and I do happen to really like Apple products but CNet's overtly-flawed battery-charging-rate methodology is just a little too odd to ignore...)
The very premise of the article is to judge which phone will "charge the fastest" and the only way to place varying models with varying battery sizes on an even scale is to measure "how much energy is added/stored in a given amount of time". The article instead measures, by percentage, how much each phone's "tank" is filled after 30 minutes while completely ignoring the fact that these are different-sized tanks. The article goes further by declaring (more than once) that iPhones are more efficient than other phones and so use power more slowly. This seems aimed at suggesting that, somehow, battery discharge rates should be considered when measuring how fast a phone's battery is able to be charged.
For what should be such an easy, straightforward approach (amount of energy over time) that oversight and the resulting unequal method of scoring seems far too obvious to not question whether there might be a little Apple favoritism at play. Why, though? Do Apple products account for a notable portion of ad revenue across CNet / Ziff Davis sites? Is it a little telling or just happenstance that, near the end of typing up my observations, I browsed to CNet.com's home page to see what advertisements might be presented there and was welcomed with a huge T-Mobile iPhone 17 banner?
