This missing feature makes it impossible to go back to Google’s Pixel

I’m a notoriously erratic gadget charger. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve heard “hurry up” while trying to get the kids out of the house for the weekend — snatching my phone off the plug at the last possible second, praying that it has enough juice to get through the day.

Having spent a good deal of my recent time with super-fast charging phones like the OPPO Find X9 Ultra and Xiaomi 17 Ultra, I’m always pleasantly surprised that just 20 minutes on the USB-C cable while eating breakfast is enough to get me through the day. However, I recently went back to the Pixel 10 Pro XL to get reacquainted with its cameras and see how I felt about gaming on its Tensor chip again. It didn’t take long for the battery anxiety to come flooding back.

Not because Pixel 10 Pro XL’s battery life is poor, though it’s not amazing, but simply because I keep forgetting to charge the thing, and it takes forever to get back on its feet when I need to. Yes, there are battery packs and MagSafe accessories I could use, but being tethered is hardly ideal when I want to whip out my Pixel to grab a fleeting snap of the kid’s latest adventures.

If there’s one feature that I really want for the upcoming Pixel 11 Pro XL, it’s faster, more reliable charging. Honestly, I think we deserve it by now.

Lagging the competition in more ways than one

Don’t take my word for it; our testing data bears out my complaint as well. Looking at the chart below, it’s hard not to be disheartened by Google’s best flagship to date. It takes roughly twice as long to fill up as the OnePlus 15, yet it has a smaller 5,200mAh Li-Ion cell compared to the OnePlus’ comparatively gargantuan 7,300mAh Si/C Li-Ion battery.

The disparity is just as bad for short top-ups; 20 minutes on the plug gets the OnePlus 15 to 64% charge, while my Pixel languishes on 45%. Not only do rival flagships offer longer battery life, but they also spend less time on the plug to deliver it.

Pixel’s charging deficiency has been made all the more galling by Samsung’s adoption of 60W charging in the new Galaxy S26 Ultra. That added power means Samsung’s Ultra hits full charge in just 42 minutes — the same as the fastest Chinese flagships on the market. Granted, it has a smaller 5,000mAh battery than these 7,000mAh-plus rivals, but it’ll be full before the Pixel 10 Pro XL reaches 80%, and it’s miles ahead on shorter top-ups as well.

In fact, even Samsung’s Plus models have 45W charging that marginally outclasses Google’s 37W peak. Google’s regular and Pro models are stuck with an even less powerful and slower 27W capability. The Pixel 10 Pro XL now only has the latest iPhone 17 series for company at the sluggish end of the smartphone charging rankings, but even Apple’s latest USB PD AVS backed phones are faster out of the gate.

As the chart below shows, Google’s charging times for its most powerful flagships have remained virtually unchanged for the past three generations. Yes, the Pixel 8 Pro has a 5,050mAh battery versus the 10 Pro XL’s 5,200Ah cell, but Google’s charging power has also jumped from 27W to 37W, yet there’s been no real improvement in time on the plug for that increase.

In that time, Samsung had reduced its charging time by a very meaningful 20 minutes between the S24 and S26 Ultras. Meanwhile, Chinese brands like OnePlus and Xiaomi have seen their total charging times increase by around 10 minutes, but still charge much faster than the Pixel and offer around 40% more battery capacity to boot.

And this is despite the added complexity of Google’s very specific and still rather niche 20V USB PD PPS charging requirement for its XL smartphones, which has complicated buying the right charger and broken fast-charging interoperability with older plugs. Either your plug supports 20V PPS, or you’re capped at the old 27W (9V/3A) power levels from the Pixel 8 Pro, with a hit to charge times to boot. Samsung’s Galaxy S26 Ultra requires 20V/3A to reach 60W, but it also supports 16V and 9V fallbacks to still provide reasonably high power with a wider range of plugs.

Any way you slice it, Pixel charging remains one of the phone’s technological pain points, and that’s before we get into the brand’s well-documented battery heating issues.

Unfortunately, there’s no easy solution to my Pixel charging woes. On the one hand, a good portion of fans are clamoring for larger batteries to match the impressive endurance of the best phones China’s brand has to offer. Without an increase in charging power, this would only exacerbate the Pixel 11’s sluggish time-to-full metrics, so the two really need to arrive hand in hand. However, there’s no indication that Google (or Apple, or Samsung, for that matter) is in a hurry to adopt silicon-carbon batteries. Some reports suggest the Pixel 11 Pro Fold might even have a smaller battery than its predecessor.

Then there are impatient users like me who want the Pixel 11 Pro XL (and the rest of the Pixel 11 series, for that matter) to just charge faster. It doesn’t have to be the quickest-charging flagship on the market, but filling a 5,200 mAh battery in less than an hour isn’t a tall order by 2026 standards. Samsung has managed it for years and has eclipsed its previous record by some margin, proving it can be done without resorting to SuperVOOC, HyperCharge, or some other proprietary standard that makes plugs and power banks a compatibility quagmire.

However, fast charging a phone battery is not just a case of cramming more power in and watching the percentages tick up. Li-Ion batteries are incredibly sensitive to input voltage, requiring high-quality batteries and precision integrated circuits to carefully manage the cycle. Google’s use of USB PD PPS is specifically designed to take some of the strain, but there’s an art to configuring the setup that’s made harder by its insistence on using what appear to be lower-quality, and presumably cheaper batteries.

Converting power from the plug requires high-quality ICs to do efficiently and without imparting too much heat into the handsets. Then there are more expensive battery technologies, such as dual-cell technology pioneered by OnePlus and OPPO, that help reduce stress and improve power efficiency. It’s clearly possible to make any modern smartphone charge quickly; it just needs to become a hardware priority.

None of this comes cheap, but this is the sort of hardware we should expect from the Pixel 11 Pro XL, a phone that will cost at least $1,199 — if RAM prices don’t send the price tag skyward. Personally, I’d rather Google invest in a little extra-premium hardware over another AI feature I’ll never use. Having a phone charge in under an hour is quickly becoming a make-or-break feature for me, especially at this price. I’ll probably skip the Pixel 11 series if nothing changes for the better this August.