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Westinghouse Commits to Green Plug's Universal A.C. Adapter
Ian Lamont writes "Westinghouse is the first major electronics manufacturer that has publicly committed to using a 'smart power technology' that will let people use a single universal adapter to power their laptops, cell phones and other electronics. The universal adapters, which use a technology developed by a startup called Green Plug, will act like a hub that several devices can plug into, and will also shut off the power supply when the device is turned off or has finished charging. The first are expected to go on sale in early 2009 for under $100, according to Westinghouse's CTO. Eventually, Westinghouse and other manufacturers that use the technology could stop shipping adapters with their products, because customers may already have universal adapters at home. However, some manufacturers may not be inclined to use universal power adapters: the article notes Apple gets supplementary revenue from the sale of proprietary connectors for the iPod and other devices."
The cost to add the technology to a company's device is listed as US$2. The cost for a company to produce their own wall wart in China...probably less than US$2....and no licensing fees to worry about and no worries that the customer might not have a charger. This idea is going nowhere.
In this case, I think the Chinese government actually got it right. They've forced all cell phone manufacturers to provide a USB port for charging the phones. Seems like a reasonable standard to me.
Cheers,
Have been saying this for years. For 120 AC power there's a standard plug. Why do I have to have a dozen different transformer bricks underneath my desk to power all of my computer, network, and phone stuff?
Now I'm all for standardizing connectors when it's possible to also standardize voltage and other power charachteristics but frankly this just seems like a really bad idea.
For starters each green plug power source is likely to be larger and bulkier than a power supply that operates at a single set of charachteristics. Given that the devices that require these power supplies are usually mobile that means it just got heavier to lug your mobile phone charger on vacation. Now you might hope that in total you would save on power supplies because you could share one power source between multiple devices. But if you only bring one power supply on your trip that means you can't leave your laptop charging in your hotel room/friend's house while taking your cell phone charger with for the day.
In short flexibility will require we still own a power supply for each device not to mention the point made in the article that each vendor is still going to want to ship a power source with their item. It seems to me a better idea is to standardize on a few power profiles and connectors instead so we can simply use more power supplies interchangeably without making them support multiple voltages.
In particular it seems best if we standardized on one connector (like the great apple magnetic one) for laptop type devices and the settled on powering the small devices through the USB standard like the iphone and other cell phones. Not only does your power cable now double as a data cable but we've saved on all the excess effort that would have gone into making smart power sources offering multiple voltages.
If you liked this thought maybe you would find my blog nice too:
You are correct. Just as you can get "USB" wallwart and car adapter chargers that put out an amp or more, there is no need for an upper limit. The trick is setting the minimum amperage that a source must supply, which would also be the maximum aperage that a client may expect(unless admittedly nonstandard). I'm not familiar enough with the engineering to know what a reasonable value for that is. I'd guess 2A or so; but that is purely off the cuff.
if we make them standard, hotels and other places will already have one available! Sure, we might need wall-warts available for just one plug, but it would be the exception.. and everybody would have one!
It's not about the "plugs" it's about the wasted power of plugged in things that aren't being used. The trouble with Wall-warts is they are stupid and drizzle power the entire time they are plugged in, even without a device attached. What do we do? we buy and extra to take on the road, so we don't have to crawl under our desks and unplug them... so we have 5 wall-warts running with no devices all day!! That's what this product is trying to eliminate because it will shut as much power circuitry as possible when the device is not used.
If this is patented, then it's doomed to fail. And a little startup together with Westinghouse doesn't sound like a good beginning. To get this off the ground, they need several laptop and cell phone manufacturers.