Blackberry is MIA on new universal charger standard
The good news, several leading phone manufactures have (finally) gotten behind a standardized standard for mobile chargers. Here’s looking at you nokia, palm, sony. Bastards. The idea is, new standard should lead to lest waste, higher efficiency standards, some not-entirely-small carbon impact and a fight back against the infestation of black knobs clogging the besieged wall sockets of your home/office/motor-yacht/camper-van.
Mildly annoying, however, is the standardization on micro-usb instead of mini, the more-or less current defacto standard. So far on board are “3 Group, AT&T, KTF, LG, Mobilkom Austria, Motorola, Nokia, Orange, Qualcomm, Samsung, Sony Ericsson, Telecom Italia, Telefónica, Telenor, Telstra, T-Mobile and Vodafone”. Canadian carriers probably being not so large enough, or european enough, or GSM enough to warrant mattering just yet.
You’ll notice from the list that the likes of RIM and HTC are missing (users mini-usb standard, bless them). Missing too is Apple, but then where would the world be without a maelstrom of changing-every-other-year proprietary dock-connecting cable and media accessories?
But if they want to keep selling in Europe, North American phone makers should have to think about it.
Related ideas we’d like to see:
- Standardize other consumer electronics on micro usb too!
- Give us multi-head usb chargers that take up just one wall socket
- DC charging sockets in vehicles, houses, public spaces etc. (like Air Canada has usb charging today)
- Now after that standard we could figure out wireless charging, we’d really be off to the races. (And Tesla would be proud)
- Gentlemen, start your infomercials.
ps. paging industry hipsters, anything else as newsworthy happening at mobile world congress?
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gabe
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Jonas
