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Harry asked: “I’m using a Samsung Gusto 3. It’s got keys on it that I can feel. My problem is my phone takes an hour and a half to charge. That’s normal for this phone. I’m losing sleep right now, sitting up waiting for this thing to charge. Do you guys know of a phone with actual keys on it that has a fast charger. Everyone I know that has a phone says it takes about 20 minutes for their phone to charge. I can’t handle this hour and a half much longer. I’m losing sleep almost every night waiting for it to charge. Sure could use a phone with keys that only takes about 20 minutes to charge. I wonder if I’ll ever find one. probably not.”
Harry, just last month a Chinese company called Meizu announced the world’s fastest charging phone with a total charge time of 20 minutes. Granted that’s for a smartphone, not a feature phone like yours, but we still suspect that your friends may be wrong about how fast their phones charge.
Flagship smartphones these days charge in about the same time as yours. Some of them feature a kind of fast charging that delivers most of the charge in 15 or 20 minutes, but take a long time to fully top off the battery. For example, a recent test of the Samsung Galaxy S8 put total charging time from fully drained at 1:40 minutes. The iPhone 7 was around 90 minutes, which basically means the same time, if you take some margin of error into account.
Older phones like yours tend to have older processors
The reason we’re bringing up smartphones is that, yes, they have larger batteries, but they also have chips that can handle quicker charging, like the Snapdragon 835 on the S8, which features a technology they call Quick Charge 4.0.
Older phones like yours tend to have older processors, your own Gusto 3 runs on a Qualcomm QSC6055, a chip from 2006.
You’re not very likely to find huge improvements in battery life from phones running older technology.
Having said that, there’s an obvious advantage your phone has going for it, its standby battery life is reportedly around 32 days! You won’t find any modern phone that can claim that. So, why not charge it whenever it’s convenient for you instead of staying up waiting for it to finish?
You can probably set it down to charge while you’re doing something else, maybe even partially charge it a few times over the course of a week and your battery will probably stay pretty full. Just plug it in while you’re taking a shower, or cooking, or watching TV. You’ll probably never run out of battery and you won’t have to sit by its side until it’s full.