A new phone branded with the popular anime Naruto charges faster than the US electrical system allows, according to its maker Realme.
The Realme GT Neo3 Naruto Edition charges at 150 watts (using a 160-watt adapter), which can charge the phone to 50% within five minutes. But that's only in countries that use more vigorous 220/240V home electricity than the US, Realme tells me.
Realme doesn't sell its phones in the US at all, and this special phone will only be sold in China, so that's not a huge issue. On a 120v system like ours, it charges at 125w, which is still faster than any US phone. The fastest-charging US phone is the 65w OnePlus 10 Pro, which has the same parent company as Realme.
Naruto is a super-popular manga franchise about ninjas, which was the backbone of the world's most prominent manga magazine, Shonen Jump, for years. It became a 72-volume book series, and two anime series totaling 720 episodes. In internet culture, it's most popular for the "Naruto run," where characters throw their arms behind them to achieve greater speed.
Realme is one of several brands of mobile-phone conglomerate BBK, which also owns Oppo, Vivo, Iqoo, and OnePlus. Realme's devices are designed to market to a youthful audience.
The co-branded phone comes in a unique leather scroll case, a signature object from the manga. And really, it's Naruto-branded all over. There are symbols on the back, special wallpapers, even a Naruto icon set that makes it nigh-impossible to tell which one is the messaging app. (I guessed by location.)
There have always been a lot of silly co-branded phones out there. Pretty early in my career, Samsung and Sprint released a "Beyonce phone," and partnerships between phones and other brands have continued ever since. Lots of them tend to be around speed, of course, like the OnePlus 7T Pro McLaren and the Iqoo 9 Pro BMW Motorsport edition. Anime-wise, there was a Sailor Moon phone in 2017 and a One Piece phone in 2020.
I'd love to see a Madoka Magica phone, but you know it would just die unexpectedly.
Amped Up
Electricity gets measured in volts, amps, and watts. Voltage is the "speed" or pressure by which electrons flow; amperage is the "width" or volume of the pipe. Multiply the two and you get wattage, or total power.
Your home electrical system typically has a fixed voltage and a limited overall amperage. If you've ever turned on one too many air conditioners and tripped a circuit breaker, that's because you went over your amperage. To efficiently use your electricity, you want devices taking the full 120 volts with as little amperage as possible.
High voltage, on the other hand, can make things hot and dangerous; it's bad for batteries. Batteries want a lower voltage at a higher amperage. And the faster they charge, the more amperage they want. That's part of why we have power bricks; they convert high-voltage low-amperage current into the other way around.
Now, you can get a lot of power out of your home's electricity, of course. My Lenovo laptop power brick turns 120v/2.5a into 20v/6.75a (135w). A PC power supply typically draws 3-5 amps.
You lose some wattage when converting from the alternating current in your wall to the direct current devices need, and you lose some from the resistance in wiring.
Realme's power adapter draws 1.9 amps. On a 120-volt system like the US, it converts that to 20v at 6.25a, or 125w. That's still faster than the fastest-charging US phone, the OnePlus 10 Pro, which charges at 65W (10v at 6.5a).
Realme's true fast charging works in countries that have a 220-240v electrical system, like most places outside North America. There, the power adapter outputs 20v at 8a, or 160w.
As far as we know, nobody is planning to do more than 65-watt charging in the US right now. And alas, don't bother importing this phone. My experience with several recent Chinese phones shows that they don't work easily or well on our networks at all.