One of the most eye-catching upgrades offered on the Samsung Galaxy S22 Ultra and Galaxy S22 Plus is 45W charging, which feels like a huge boost over the 25W on the Samsung Galaxy S21 lineup. But if you were hoping that would mean charging nearly twice as fast, you're apparently out of luck.
GSMArena tested the phones with three chargers: a 25W Samsung charger, a 45W Samsung charger, and a 65W third-party charger, and found charging speeds to be about the same with all of them.
A full charge of the Samsung Galaxy S22 Ultra with the 25W charger for example took 64 minutes, and with the 45W it took 59 minutes. So switching to 45W only saved 5 minutes. The 65W charger split the difference to 62 minutes.
The difference when charging the Samsung Galaxy S22 Plus was even smaller, with the 25W charger taking 62 minutes while the 45W charger took 61 minutes, so there was only a one minute difference.
Partial loads tell a similar story. Charge the Samsung Galaxy S22 Ultra for 30 minutes on a dead battery and it will reach 61% with a 25W charger based on these tests, while the 45W charger actually performed slightly worse at 60%, the 65W managed 65%. The Samsung Galaxy S22 Plus achieved 62% at the same time with the 25W charger and 64% with the 45W charger.
So overall it seems like using a 45W charger will power these phones faster, but only for a few minutes at most. That's even more disappointing when you consider that many rival phones offer much more power charging than Samsung even claims, with 80W on the OnePlus 10 Pro and 120W on the Xiaomi 12 Pro, for example.
It's not entirely clear why Samsung's 45W charging seems to perform so poorly, or if a software update could improve things, but it's disappointing to see.
Still, since it doesn't include a charger in the box, that means there's no need to run out and buy a 45W one, when a 25W one will apparently do the job almost as well.
Analysis: the opposite of Apple
In some ways, this is the opposite of what we found with the iPhone 13 Pro Max, because while Samsung seems to advertise more power charging than its phones can actually achieve, Apple has apparently underestimated the charging potential of its flagship products.
Apple advertises 20W charging for each model in the iPhone 13 lineup, but tests have shown that with a more powerful charger you can get 23W from the iPhone 13 Pro and 27W from the iPhone 13 Pro Max.
Ultimately, that's still what you're apparently going to get from the Samsung Galaxy S22 lineup, but under-promising and over-delivering is always better than not.