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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?

ISupply has released the results of their tear down analysis of the new 3G iphone. Apparently the component and assembly costs of the device is $179. Forgetting for a second the hundreds of millions Apple likely has and will spend on the design, development and marketing of the device… that’s pretty cheap. So want to know what the things are made of? (they’re not just full of stars apparently)

So there you have the ingredients. Though I don’t think that just the list and a trusty ikea alen key is going to help you put one together.

Anyhow, here is the real kicker:

“At a hardware BOM and manufacturing cost of $173, the new iPhone is significantly less expensive to produce than the first-generation product, despite major improvements in the product’s functionality and unique usability, due to the addition of 3G communications,” said Dr. Jagdish Rebello, director and principal analyst for iSuppli. “The original 8Gbyte iPhone carried a cost of $226 after component price reductions, giving the new product a 23 percent hardware cost reduction due to component price declines.”

Imagine, for a second, a world where great warehouses in shenzhen churn out pre-designed Android devices (which would basically the same components) or devices with the newly-free S60 OS or cheap-ish windows mobile. Then imagine the churning out of such devices a year from now 23% cheaper and with a few more features, then 23% cheaper than that another year later… all hitting the shelves of Walmart, Canadacomputers or 7eleven at nominal markup.

This (thank you Moore’s law) is another reason why the next several years are going to be a very interesting time to be in mobile.

In case you missed it (we did) Ars Technica posted a great (if a little geeky) article on RISC vs. CISC in the mobile era which is worth a read. CISC vs. RISC are two different chip architectures, and once, one of the great nerdy flame-war debates of the 80s-90s era internet. Basically CISC won.

CISC, for anyone without a computer engineering degree, is the architecture or essentially the language spoken by Intel and all PC chips. RISC was spoken by many server chips, mainframes and Apple computers (in the 604 and G4/G5 days) and by tiny embeded CPU designs like ARM.

Everyone pretty much admits that RISC was/is, in theory, more elegant than CISC, especially when considering the significantly fewer number of transistors you had to cram on to a chip to make a RISC CPU actually work. In the end though, thanks to Moore’s Law and market forces these differences became marginalized and Intel/CISC pretty much swept the market. Even Apple (wisely) switched to Intel. Except for the iPhone.

The last holdout for RISC has been mobile. In mobile and embedded applications (like the little CPU in your home router) every transistor and square millimeter of silicon counts because of cost and power requirements. You’d need a fan and 2pound battery to run your cell phone if there was an Intel pentium or centrino in there. CISC/Intel CPUs have never been able to compete in the mobile space. Until now.

Intel has just launched the Atom processor for mobile devices. The Atom is still a ways off (0.25W idle power to 4W active) in competing with ARM(Risc) cpus in power (0.01W-0.25W) but this is a lot closer than the typical maximum 9Watts to 35Watts (depending on model) required to power your laptop’s centrino chip.

RISC-speaking ARM or MIPS type chips will continue to rull the mobile market for a while, but clearly the barbarians are at the gate. In the next few years Intel has every intention of driving down the power requirements of Atom processors to compete for handsets.

But the ARM makers aren`t sitting still either. They have some pretty impressive looking designs on the not-too-distant road map. Quad-core processors in your handset anyone? Interesting times and interesting capabilities are ahead, my friends.

Significance for WirelessNorth.ca readers: What can you do with significantly more processing power in a mobile? Think better graphics and better/faster video encode/decode capabilities. Think useful voice recognition, image recognition, people/landmark recognition and other computer vision applications. Forget ordinary geolocation, with enough transistorized brains, your phone could do echolocation. heh.

We’re all for bringing on the mobile processor wars. :)