The new Samsung Galaxy S10 joins Huawei in offering Reverse Wireless Charging capabilities to power up your other gadgets on the go. Samsung calls this Wireless PowerShare, but the principle is the same. A quick toggle from the Settings Menu and you’re ready to charge up your Galaxy Watch, Galaxy Buds, or any other Qi-certified device. That includes other smartphones.
We’ve previously tested the Huawei Mate 20 Pro’s reverse wireless charging speeds — which turned out not to be very fast. It’s time to see if the Samsung Galaxy S10 can perform any better.
Just as before, we’re charging up a Google Pixel 3 and using the Ampere app to grab the battery charge rate for the device in mAh. By comparing known charging speeds from USB Type-C and Wireless Charging stands with the results, we obtain a rough guide to how fast or slow Reverse Wireless Charging is.
The Samsung Galaxy S10 provides faster reverse wireless charging.
The results show that the Samsung Galaxy S10’s Wireless PowerShare is capable of providing between 3.5 and 4W of power. By comparison, the Huawei Mate 20 Pro offers between 2.5 and 3W of power. However, both are substantially slower than regular wireless charging. This is to be expected given that you won’t want your phone’s battery to drain quickly just to charge up another device.
1W of power, or about 210mAh in the case of the Pixel 3, isn’t going to make a massive difference to charging times. Smartphone batteries are so big that it will take hours to charge up these devices using reverse wireless charging. However, that extra watt of power could make a meaningful difference when charging up devices with smaller batteries, such as headphones or smartwatches.
What is Wireless PowerShare good for?
Despite the advertising materials, neither Huawei’s nor Samsung’s reverse wireless charging technology is suitable for charging other smartphones. They’re simply too slow to charge up devices with big batteries in any realistic time frame, as it’s slower than connecting to an old USB port. Although that isn’t to say that you couldn’t use this technology as a last resort.
Reverse wireless charging is more useful charging up devices with small batteries. Smartwatches and fitness trackers, as well as Qi wireless headphones, make sense to charge this way. Reverse wireless charging still isn’t the quickest way to power up these devices, but a short period on the back of your phone could lease them another hour or more of battery life. That’s a particularly handy feature when accessories run out of juice while you’re away from home.
When it comes to juicing up your accessories, the Samsung Galaxy S10 and its Wireless PowerShare technology is a smidgen faster than the Huawei Mate 20 Pro’s reverse wireless charging, but both have pretty limited use cases.