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EU Commissioner Wants Standard For Mobile Phone Connectors
Jantastic writes "European Commissioner Günter Verheugen wants manufacturers of mobile phones to come up with a standard connector for chargers and microphones. If companies fail to do so, proposed legislation should speed up this process. In theory, this could improve competition, while enabling longer life cycles for these devices."
Any reason why we (consumers) should be against this?
Well, since this is the government, they'll inevitably come up with a standard where the connector is 6 inches long and 3 inches wide, has 874 tiny easily breakable pins, and requires a power brick that weighs 20 pounds. Also, the chargers will cost $438,000.
Communism works, but is not escalable to more than one person.
...they could go with this.
THL phish sticks
The best part is that, if I forget my adapter, the company makes tons of profits on selling after-market power adapters! They make so much money on those $30 aftermarket adapters that they can afford to drop their prices elsewhere!
This also means they are helping out the economy, and so, by your participation, you are helping the economy.
Without this sort of lock-in price-gouging, the U.S economy could be in real trouble. It could even go into a deep recession.
Why couldn't the dumb device emulate a PC and just agree to give the phone what it wants?
You mean have the dumb device emulate a smart device? What a great idea!
mandated this years ago, we could be using a DB25 connector on our cell phones today!