Five hours of battery in five minutes

A dead battery can make your world crumble if it comes at a bad time. Photo / Getty

For our smartphone obsessed society, an unexpected dead battery can be an unbridled disaster.

For those worried about being caught unable to take that perfect Instagram photo, or getting lost without the safety of Google Maps, then fear no more.

A new technology promises to give your mobile a supercharge boost meaning you can get hours of battery life by the time it takes you to read this article.

US company Qualcomm which makes semiconductors and telecommunications equipment for smartphones debuted its new super-fast charging technology dubbed Quick Charge 4 last week.

The company makes chips and other internal hardware bits for a majority of top Android smartphones on the market including handsets for Samsung, LG and HTC.

As the name denotes, it's the company's fourth generation of charging technology and offers up a major advance in performance.

"We put a lot of hard work and engineering into new products, and we're going to deliver what we hope is a much better charging experience from 2016," Qualcomm's senior director of product management Everett Roach said at the unveiling.

Depending on the device, the company says Quick Charge 4 will provide phones with five hours of battery life in just five minutes, or up to 50 per cent of a battery's capacity in under 15 minutes.

The generation of Quick Charge equates to about a 20 per cent increase in efficiency from the company's latest version, Quick Charge 3.

The new technology will appear in Qualcomm's Snapdragon 835 chip, which is expected to launch early next year. So if you want to reap the benefits of super fast charging, you'll need to look out for phones that use the Snapdragon 835 chip next year - something that has not yet been made public.

The latest version comes at a crucial time for Qualcomm. The global recall of Samsung's Galaxy Note 7 due to phones catching fire and reports of dodgy third-party chargers also causing phones to catch fire has seen safety become a matter of paramount importance for smartphone manufacturers.

In fact Google - who has recently entered the smartphone wars with the release of its first device - sought to address the issue by implementing new guidelines for Android manufacturers which included charging recommendations that appear to ban Qualcomm's Quick Charge tech.

The recommendations called for all phones to be USB-PD compliant - a specification intended to make USB-charged devices safer.

Quick Charge 3 is not, however Quick Charge 4 is fully compliant with Google's new recommendations.

"Quick Charge 4 addresses that need by providing up to 50 per cent battery charge in roughly 15 minutes or less, so you don't have to spend all day chained to your charging cable," Alex Katouzian, Qualcomm's vice president of product management, said in a statement.

So for those who live in perennial fear of a depleted phone battery, you can expect Qualcomm's charging technology to appear in Android phones in early 2017.