Thirty minutes beats overnight, if the charger matches the phone

The last thing a lot of phones do before bed is sit on a nightstand, cable in, pretending eight hours on the wall is still a technical requirement. Mike Sorrentino, CNET's senior mobile editor, opened the outlet's latest write-up of its lab data with a line no spec sheet would risk: "The habit of charging your phone overnight probably needs to go to sleep."

StandBy mode, a snore tracker, a charge limit already at 80 percent: those are reasons to stay plugged in. The people he is talking to drop a phone at 40 percent into a wall socket at 11pm because tomorrow feels unsafe. CNET's 30-minute tests on 115 phones since 2023 keep producing the same correction. A morning coffee charge now does the nightstand's old job, provided the watt number on the slide matches the brick in the drawer.

Samsung's Galaxy S26 Ultra is the cleanest exhibit. It is the first Ultra at 60W, still a 5,000mAh cell, and in CNET's wired 30-minute test, which starts at 10 percent or less, it added 76 percent. The S24 Ultra and S23 Ultra both added 45 percent in the same window.

GSMArena's lab logged 51 percent at the 15-minute mark and 84 percent at 30 on its best run, with a full fill in 43 minutes. Samsung's own claim was 75 percent in half an hour. The video review was a shade more conservative. "We're able to charge the phone to a respectable 81 percent in half an hour, and a full charge took 45 minutes," the presenter said, after noting that 5,000mAh "may not be an impressive size for batteries these days, but the S26 Ultra does plenty with what it's got."

Apple's jump is smaller in watts. The iPhone 17 Pro added 74 percent in CNET's 30-minute wired test, against 57 percent for the 16 Pro. PhoneArena's Vic put the whole 17 line on a meter and watched the cable settle at 36 watts, "close enough to the advertised 40 watt speeds." At 30 minutes he had 67 percent on the iPhone 17 and 17 Pro, 64 percent on the Pro Max, and 54 percent on the Air, which is still capped at 20W. The 17 Pro Max reached 100 percent in 1 hour 16 minutes, against 1 hour 42 for the 16 Pro Max. Compared with last year's Pro Max he called it "definitely a bit faster," not a new species of charger.

Those percentages assume the wall plug matches the spec sheet. Apple and Samsung generally ship a cable and no brick. Look up the phone's peak and buy something that can deliver it. GSMArena found the S26 Ultra does not even need a thick 5A cable. Super Fast Charging 3.0 is USB Power Delivery with a 3A/20V PPS profile. Current never climbed above 3A, so no thick 5A cable is required; a third-party 67W PD charger produced similar times, and the phone held 51 to 53W for a long stretch before dropping toward 40W.

PhoneArena got the same check on the iPhone side. A Samsung 45W brick, an Asus ROG 65W plug and a couple of third-party PD pucks all pushed the 17-series phones to that same 36W ceiling. Vic's advice was not to buy Apple's new 40W Dynamic Power Adapter for a couple of minutes. The iPhone 17 does not speak PPS, older PD chargers fall back to fixed voltage steps, "but it is still fast charging."

OnePlus still prints the number that makes a 60W Ultra look timid, and the number does not travel. Techniqued's bench used the 120W SuperVOOC brick that arrives in that region's box. From 2 percent, the 7,300mAh OnePlus 15 hit 75 percent at 30 minutes and 100 percent in 46 minutes 51 seconds. OnePlus claims about 39 minutes; the presenter treated that as a lab figure.

Adam Doud at ZDNET ran a US OnePlus 15, an S26 Ultra and an iPhone 17 Pro Max on a wall meter, once with each brand's own kit and once with Anker. The OnePlus pack, advertised at 120W, "isn't even close to its advertised 120W speed." It spent the whole session between 20 and 40 percent of that rating and peaked at 46W. Full charge took a little over an hour. The S26 Ultra peaked at 61W and finished in under an hour. The iPhone needed more than 90 minutes, which is why Doud still charges his overnight. CNET's US OnePlus 15 test, using the 80W proprietary brick that actually ships here, still added 72 percent in 30 minutes. Fast, and a reminder that the same model name is not the same charger.

PhoneArena made the proprietary catch explicit in an earlier charge test, on the OnePlus 13: a 100W Anker PD brick will not unlock those speeds. "OnePlus fast charging is great, but it's proprietary," Vic said. You need the OnePlus protocol or you fall back. That is the opposite of the S26 Ultra, which will take a generic 60W PD PPS plug and get on with it.

CNET averaged wired and wireless 30-minute results across 33 phones and handed the overall title to the iPhone 17 Pro. Wired, the S26 Ultra is faster. Wireless, the 17 Pro added 55 percent in 30 minutes on Qi2.2; the Ultra added 39 percent. Four of the top five wireless results were iPhones. The Ultra supports the same 25W Qi2.2 ceiling, but as GSMArena put it, the phone is "compatible with magnetic wireless charging accessories, but only if you use a magnetic case, as there's still no magnets inside the phone." Apple has shipped MagSafe magnets since 2020.

Leave the phone on the nightstand if you like the clock face. If you are plugging in out of habit, a 30-minute morning session on a brick that actually matches the spec is now the more honest routine. Watch the half-hour percentage, and treat 120W as a regional rumour until a meter agrees.