Robert Triggs / Android Authority
The new Xiaomi 17 series has a lot of technology on show, especially as it is the first phone to sport Qualcomm’s new Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 processor. But what’s caught the eye is another sky-high performance metric — 100W charging.
Ah, I hear you exclaim, 100W charging in a phone is hardly news — proprietary charging standards from China hit that benchmark years ago. But Xiaomi is doing something different this year. It supports this lickety-split power level over the universal USB Power Delivery PPS protocol. That’s the very same protocol used by the far slower Google and Samsung, amongst others, and it’s not just reserved for the Ultra model either.
The good news should be obvious — with the Xiaomi 17 series, you won’t have to buy a specific charger to obtain the fastest possible speeds. The same adapter that powers your laptop, headphones, and any other gadget can also deliver 100W to this phone, as long as it meets some increasingly common requirements. Even if your plug can’t deliver the full 100W (it’ll no doubt require a rarer 20V PPS iteration), you’ll still receive the fastest charging speed the plug itself can handle, removing some of the guesswork of finding the ideal charging accessory.
100W charging over USB PD PPS is the beginning of the end for proprietary protocols.
Most pleasing of all, this move suggests the curtain is finally drawing on the long-running saga of proprietary USB charging protocols. While it remains to be seen if other brands will support their fastest speeds via USB PD PPS this year or if they’ll hold out for a little longer, the writing has been on the wall for some time.
In China, collaboration on the Unified Fast Charging Specification (UFCS) standard, designed to be interoperable with USB Power Delivery 3.1, has brought together the big names under a single umbrella. Their latest phones not only play nicer with each other’s charging accessories but also the key standards more widespread in Western markets.
In fact, previous-generation Chinese flagship handsets have already become much better at supporting USB PD PPS. I clocked last year’s Xiaomi 15 Ultra at 60W via PPS, making it very fast on common adapters even before the latest iteration. The OnePlus 13 and OPPO Find X6 Pro also offer around 30W of PPS power, so they’re highly compatible with fast third-party plugs and power banks.
Proprietary charging has been on the decline for a while, but this latest development makes it positively obsolete and puts pressure on the rest of the industry to do better.
Apple, Google, and Samsung — the western laggards
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