Make sure you buy the right charger for these 2025 flagship phones

The multifunctional USB-C port might be handy for connecting everything with a single cable, but its opaque nature leaves much to be desired when it comes to knowing which charger will power up even the best smartphones as quickly as possible. This situation has been made all the more complicated by brands dropping smartphone chargers from their boxes, leaving you to hope a current model works or having to splash out extra cash on a new charger.

While it’s true that some brands have dropped chargers from their boxes for a few generations now, this has tended to be companies like Apple, Google, and Samsung, which use the widely supported USB Power Delivery protocol to charge their handsets. This year, however, I’ve reviewed plenty of smartphones that rely on proprietary charging capabilities to charge as quickly as possible yet don’t include a charger in the box. Just when I thought USB-C charging could get any worse.

Take the Xiaomi 15, for instance. The handset boasts 90W charging capabilities via a Xiaomi HyperCharge compatible plug, but power it with a more common USB-C plug with Power Delivery capabilities, and you’ll be restricted to about 27W, which is less than a third of the advertised power. This also means the phone takes 75 minutes to reach 100%, which is far slower than the 40 -45 minutes seen from a proprietary charger.

Likewise, the OnePlus 13 and OPPO Find X8 Pro sit at a very similar 26W from every USB PD PPS plug I have at my disposal, far below the 80W power level found in the phone’s marketing material. While I haven’t been able to test every phone on the market this year, here’s a summary of my findings so far.

There are a few asterisks here. The Xiaomi 15 Ultra supports up to 45W or 60W from a USB PD PSS plug, depending on whether the charger supports the less common 20V mode. Meanwhile, the HONOR Magic 7 Pro can hit 44W from either a 20V/3A or 9V/5A PPS-compatible plug, but no higher.

China’s top brands aren’t alone in messing consumers around when it comes to fast charging. Google’s Pixel 9 Pro XL also has the rarer 20V PPS requirement for 45W, meaning few consumers are likely to already own a plug that will power the phone as quickly as advertised. Without one, they’ll have to settle for 26W instead. Only Google’s engineers know why the XL went this way when other brands can hit the same power levels from more common 9V chargers.

A final point is that powering most phones without the PSS addition to the USB Power Delivery specification will leave them waiting hours for a full charge. I recorded just 7W into the Find X8 Pro, 10W into the Magic 7 Pro, and 14W into the Xiaomi 15 Ultra with a 100W USB PD 3.0 charger. You certainly don’t want to charge any of them with one of these older but still very common plugs.

Clearly, some brands are better than others at working with the USB Power Delivery PPS specification, and many are even worse with the older PD 3.0 spec. I have no idea why Xiaomi offers differing levels of support within its own flagship series. Thankfully, 45W of power seen by HONOR’s Magic 7 Pro and the Xiaomi 15 Ultra will still charge them up before the hour mark, even though this will be far slower than their advertised times of closer to 30 minutes.

Unfortunately, the phones on our list that can’t breach 30W will take over an hour to charge fully. Plus, they lose the perk of the fast times to get you back on your feet from near empty. That’s a significant drawback to picking the wrong charger, given that this is often the chief selling point of Chinese phones, compared to the usual Apple, Google, and Samsung trio.

If you want to ensure one of these Chinese smartphones powers up as quickly as possible, you’ll only receive those super-high power levels from a proprietary plug. However, those are not always good at fast-charging gadgets that use other standards, making some of them (particularly the USB-A models) useless if you have multiple phone brands, tablets, and laptops in the house.

To power everything at a reasonable power level, your best bet is to grab a USB PD PPS plug with 20V support. Our list of the best USB chargers offers plenty of options. While they won’t necessarily charge Chinese phones as quickly as they advertise, 20V support is your best bet at hitting the best universal speeds possible.