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Universal Phone Charger Approved By UN Body
andylim writes "Plans for a universal mobile phone charger have been approved by the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), a United Nations body. The charger has a micro-USB port at the connecting end, using technology similar to what is commonly used with digital cameras. It is not compulsory for manufacturers to adopt the new chargers, but the ITU says that some have already signed up to it. 'We are planning to launch the universal charger internationally during the first half of 2010,' Aldo Liguori, spokesperson for Sony Ericsson told the BBC."
Now I can take my UK charger to America and still have to but a new adapter/charger!
Make a whole lot of sense to me... could use more of the same in other areas.
Although it is funny to watch all the iPhone users I work with scrabble about sharing one cable at work between them whilst we drown in a sea of standard USB cabling!
The problem with slashdot is that most of its users were bullied and stuffed into lockers as kids!
If Apple would now implement a micro-USB port onto the iPhone instead of that dock connector.
And preferably something easy to take out. The end of the cable that came with my iPhone is rather small and hard to pull compared to the one that came with my 2nd gen. Nano.
This folks is one of the two UN organisations (both older than the UN) who could run the WWW better than ICANN. The other being the Postal Union (UPU or IPU I think they changed their name).
So, there you go, the UN is not just the political shit. The ITU is what means that you can phone from point A to point B, they are the logical choice for control over the WWW and domain name system.
My last two digital cameras had mini-usb ports, neither was physically the same.
voltages. You know, without lugging various plugs along and all that.
The closest to this is the humble car charger, but as far as I can tell, sadly airports and hotels I've been at don't have 12v sockets handy (maybe I didn't look hard enough and be wrong). There isn't always access to a car and in a lot of places, you don't exactly want to leave expensive electronics in one.
My last two digital cameras had mini-usb ports, neither was physically the same.
Then, by definition, they were not mini-usb ports.
Both Micro and MiniUSB jacks are standardized. If your two cameras didn't use a common connector, then there's a good chance that at least one of the two was using a proprietary jack for USB.
It's good to have a standard, pity it's 10 years late. Also, why the hell is this not mandatory?
Now all we need is a universal standard of (in the words of Douglas Adams) 'little dongly things' for everything else:
http://www.douglasadams.com/dna/980707-03-a.html
'The little dongly things I am concerned with (and they are by no means the only species of little dongly things with which the micro-electronics world is infested) are the external power adaptors which laptops and palmtops and external drives and cassette recorders and telephone answering machines and powered speakers and other incredibly necessary gizmos need to step down the mains AC supply from either 120 volts or 240 volts to 6 volts DC. Or 4.5 volts DC. Or 9 volts DC. Or 12 volts DC. At 500 milliamps. Or 300 milliamps. Or 1200 milliamps. They have positive tips and negative sleeves on their plugs, unless they are the type that has negative tips and positive sleeves. By the time you multiply all these different variables together you end up with a fairly major industry which exists, so far as I can tell, to fill my cupboards with little dongly things none of which I can ever positively identify without playing gizmo pelmanism. The usual method of finding a little dongly thing that actually matches a gizmo I want to use is to go and buy another one, at a price that can physically drive the air from your body...It's hard to imagine that some of the mightiest brains on the planet, fuelled by some of the finest pizza that money can buy, haven't at some point thought 'Wouldn't it be easier if we all just standardised on one type of DC power supply?'...I strongly suspect that if you stuck a hardware engineer in a locked room for a couple of days and taunted him with the smell of pepperoni, he'd probably be able to think of a way of making whatever gizmo (maybe even the new gizmo Pro, which I've heard such good things about) it is he's designing, work to a standard DC low-power supply.'
Great. Now I can have everything limited to charging at, at a maximum, 500 mA @ 5 V! Just what I've always want... oh wait, I think the charging times for most of my gadgets are already too long. If you can't charge to full capacity within a lunch break, it takes too damned long.
Remember this February news: http://mobile.slashdot.org/story/09/02/16/206213 "EU Commissioner Wants Standard For Mobile Phone Connectors"
Glad to see the UN is tackling the important stuff first.
So your last three phones weren't Sony Ericcson models, I gather.
Good for vou!
Free Manning, jail Obama.
Why this was tagged !important is beyond me. This only has plus points! It is a very important step in reducing carbon- and other needless emissions. Imagine how much this saves in copper and other materials! The price of phones and other appliances can go down a small bit because the consumer doesn't have to pay for a charger every time it buys a new one. Packages become smaller so shipping new phones costs less energy. Shops can store more phones in the same space, so the chance that the phone you want is out of stock will become smaller... I could go on and on. This is a giant leap for the environment and the consumer!
-- Cheers!
The Koreans carriers back in late 2005 and China a year later. It's about bloody time - the world needs less junk.
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
The plugs are annoying, but you can literally get a set for under ten bucks. It's usually not that hard to plan ahead and carry the one or two you will need for the countries you're visiting. Practically all phone chargers run on 100-240V, anywhere fom 50-60 Hz (and probably then some!) and all you need is the plug.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
What was wrong with the already approaching-de-facto standard of mini usb? Or is it only that popular where I am?
Mini USB is one of those things that *everyone* has a lead for, they come with cameras and mp3 players and the like. What's better about micro usb?
> "We are planning to launch the universal charger internationally during the first half of 2010,' Aldo Liguori, spokesperson for Sony Ericsson told the BBC."
Wow. This must be one of those UN resolutions that are enforced by the USAF.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
Universal standard?
Somebody please tell the UN that their jurisdiction is limited to this planet only, and they can't go round telling G'ould, Klimgons, Kzinti, Minbari, Mersians and Moties what to do.
3.5mm jack?
bluetooth?
wikipedia agrees with you: As of January 30, 2009 Micro-USB has been accepted by almost all cell phone manufacturers as the standard charging port (including Apple, Motorola, Nokia, LG, RIM, Samsung, Sony Ericsson) in the EU and most of the world.
And I have a sanyo and a samsung that both use it.
More plug cycles. Mini is rated for 5,000 plug/unplug cycles, micro is rated for 10,000.
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
Oh well, this just means we'll see overpriced micro-mini adapters from Monster Cable with oxygen free dual overhead cam gold plated contacts in every phone store.
- Wikipedia
My wife's new phone has a micro-USB port for the charger, but the only way to add data is via a micro-SD card.
My Motorola RAZR V3r is mini-usb, as well as my chi-pod and the digital camera that I use at work. One charger to rule them all, one charger to bind them.
With the seem editor and file manager in moto4lin I can tweak the RAZR as much as I want, as a result of which I have avoided getting a new phone for several years. Motorola doesn't make RAZR anymore, afaik.
Mini-USB is convenient and I wouldn't mind seeing it in everything. The micro-USB doesn't seem as robust, but it may simply be unfamiliar.
there are micro A and micro B ports, so they could have been those he was referring too
All of the above was encrypted with a Quad ROT-13 method. Unauthorized decryption is in violation of the DMCA.
I like it! It will surely save us lot of money while on international business traveling. Phone communication expenses is my large bill during trips.
I'd be happy if they simply killed off the wall wart.
Surely they mean terrestrial, not universal. Or are we really hoping that the Xymoleians from Sirius B will adapt to this standard?
The wall-wart contains the circuitry that converts 110vac/240vac to low voltage DC. Killing the wall wart means that same circuitry goes into the device, meaning that devices will now be larger by the size of the wall wart.
More sensible would be to simply make everything charge via USB, as USB is already a low-power DC source, and most low power (say 10W and under) devices can be made to work from it. Future versions of USB could even be made to allow higher current delivery, allowing higher draw devices to be connected.
Devices like modem routers though will always have a wall wart, unless you want them to be obscenely large and heavy. I'm happy for those devices to stay as-is however, as the vast majority of them are 12V 1A or below, so I just bought a dozen 12V 1A adapters from eBay once, and now I don't have to worry about losing them as they all work with each others' adapters.
Just remember, as long as the voltage is the same, the adapter can work. Most devices will have their input voltage stamped on them near the power jack, match it with an adapter and off you go. Just make sure that the adapter is capable of delivering as much or more current than necessary.
E.g., a modem router than says "Input 12v 500mA" will work just fine with my standard 12v 1A adapters.
I hate printers.
I have had 4 digital cameras that have failed after a couple of hundred insertions using mini-USB. I know people who have gone through 3 or 4 Playstation Dualshock 3 controllers as the socket damaged in the same way. The pins usually bend downwards.
as: suddenoutbreakofcommonsense
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If it is not compulsory for phone manufacturers to include it, what is the point of approving it?
That is so awesome. Too bad this is still 5 years out in the US. At least we have standardized the AC outlet side of it. We're half way there!
I hope and kind of know that they will use this for non-cellphones like mp3 players and other gadgets. It is seriously stupid the amount of chargers that exist at home...
Copyright infringement is "piracy" in the same way DRM is "consumer rape"
Do you have even the slightest idea what the ITU is?
Manufacturers don't actually need to use a wall-wart as such. They could easily use a length of cable terminated by a normal plug, with the "wart" part of it at some point on the cable away from the socket.
That way, we wouldn't have that continual problem with running out of usable power outlets because of some fucking wall-wart taking up more than its fair share of space.
If they standardized the power supply, then you could build it into the wall in the same way we already have standardized high voltage AC power (well, standard for a particular region). In fact, there is enough room on most wall socket panels that you could add something similar to a USB connector on them.
.and what does this have to do with universal phone chargers?
The linked story was full of popups.
Firefox and Adblock Plus. 'nuff said.
Just remember they're pulling this shit when they start crowing about how many hits they're getting on Bing. They way they're doing it, people don't even have to click on anything to count as a hit.
Is this new standard water resistant? It has to be if it ever gets to military devices. I always though the Apple MAC power connector could easy be water resistant just by sealing the edges around where the connector meets the body during assembly. Just think, expanding that could have a universal connector for mobile devices that can survive a dunk in the pool or toilet.
Just because it has the same form factor doesn't make the chargers compatible.
Output power makes a huge difference.
I have chargers going from 300 to 1000 milliamps, and the low powered charges don't work well in higher power draw devices.
Moto nerfed the chargers for some of it's phones by adding a resistor that allows the phone to recognize an "unauthorized" charger.
Hahahahaha !
SIP a single RFC? Can you imagine the number of SIP related RFCs and associated drafts? SIP WAS simple, it is now a mess. Even if we restrict to RFC 3261, if you can asnwer the following questions you are already a MASTER in SIP:
- what is the difference between request URI and the "To" header? Are they redundant?
- what is the difference between the "Contact" header, the "P-Asserted-Identity" header and the "From" header?
- what is the loose routign mechanism and what is the relationship with the "Via" headers?
- what is the need for "from tags" and 'to tags".
If we go a bit further:
- Why is SIP/SIMPLE do we need to introduce an "etag" and why not resuing the callid ?
- etc.
We are a company that is based on SIP and very in favor of this protocol mostly form market reasons but one should not be blind: this protocol has its problems like any other. At the beginning, it was sooo "simple" that it could not even support "announced transfer" or line supervision which is a must for corporate telephony then the real people jumped in and added what it takes to make it usable and added complexity.
Even the big telco that are hated so much in this forum jumped in and created the IMS standards based on SIP (under the ETSI Umbrella = European ...). They took it to the next level of complexity but they NEEDED IT because they are the guys who enable you and me to call from A to B without even thinking about how this is done (since more that 100 years).
If you imagine one second that you can only read ONE RFC to start working on the real SIP world, you are VERY WRONG (see RFC 3581, RFC2327, RFC 3264, RFC 3550 + all the RFC dedicated to packetization, SIP/SIMPLE, MESSAGING, ....)
Now if you compare SIP with H.323, I agree that initially, one can see a lot of advantages.
- H323 has a stupid protocol layering
- slow dialog establishment, etc?
and although they have improved this, this is still not perfect but they have advandages as well:
- camera control and double video streams are a reality in H.323 world wher in SIP it is still on paper only and badly documented.
- screen and application sharing are a reality on H.323 world. They are non existant in SIP
- H.323 has defined a clean standard for NAT traversal where SIP has a set of "best practices" spread in various RFC (keepalive, rport, symetric RTP, etc.).
if you cannot read the ITU standards that is basically because:
- most of them need to be bought
- they have a strong culture of separating the function and the encoding, which renders them difficult to grasp for field hackers
- ITU protocols are often based on ASN.1 BER encoding and therefore are compact an binaries and cannot be test with a simple TELNET connection, which seems to trouble a lot of Internet gurus.
Emmanuel
http://www.ives.fr/
My Blackberry 8700v (yes, it's old) rejects my Tomtom-USB car charger after 5 seconds. So I can't charge my Blackberry in the car.
My solution to Blackberry on WindowsXP and Windows7, is simply to connect the Blackberry, then the Windows hardware wizard asks if it can connect to Windows Update for a driver - say "yes" and a simple and unobtrusive "RIMUSB.sys" on XP (RimUsb_AMD64.sys on Windows7_64) will get installed automatically. Then you can charge your Blackberry normally without any annoying Blackberry software being installed.
You're talking about mini USB That's a different standard.
The UN standard is for micro USB. The micro USB standard was adopted in 2008. It's a different connector.
Mostly agreed. Still, it is possible to write a SIP endpoint based on a couple of well delimited RFCs (SIP, authentication, RTP), while even decoding the hierarchy of an H.323 message is a mess.
As for the culture of writing in a language developers can't read, and charging for access to standards: if it depended on the ITU the Internet would not exist and sending bits across continents would be considered an expensive technological miracle, much like international phone calls 30 years ago.
What the hell does Scott Adams have to do with anything?
... and then they built the supercollider.
Now can we please have carrier connect standards so i can move from one carrier to another without having to get new hardware 1/2 the time?
I don't have that problem with my land line and can choose any model i want, so why should i have it with my cellular 'line' ?
---- Booth was a patriot ----
So in other words, you don't know shit about shit, but that won't stop your from shooting your mouth off.
Devices like modem routers though will always have a wall wart, unless you want them to be obscenely large and heavy.
I don't see any real gain from the users point of view in having that bulk and weight in an extra box.
The real reason so much stuff uses wall warts is because it makes the regulatory compliance issues much easier/cheaper to deal with.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
I'm sorry, but I seem to be missing something here.
these work by magnets, as I understand.
While I'm not sure that that magnets are bad for electronics/flash type drives, they sure as hell can't be good for my ipod classic (120gb).
Be seeing you...
Blame the Yanks for that one. Most of the world operates on 210-240v. As an Australian I can take a 240v Australian power pack to any country in Asia except Japan (even then its mostly OK because 110v will not cause much damage to a PSU expecting 240v). My biggest issue is that Most of SE Asia use the NEMA plug (which will fall out if a slight breeze passes it) or the even more annoying UK plug.
12v is almost never used although most hotels in the Philipines will have a 12v plug in their bathrooms.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
It probably also has to do with different standards for AC-connected equipment in every country. The router is the same the world over, but the wall warts are all different, because every national regulating body thought of different requirements for them.
could we at least get an international standard outlet? same prongs? same voltage?
It's perfectly feasible to design a device to meet all the regulatory regimes anyone cares about it's just expensive.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
The usual method of finding a little dongly thing that actually matches a gizmo I want to use is to go and buy another one, at a price that can physically drive the air from your body...
Whenever I get a new gadget, the first thing I do is always to write its name with a permanent pen on its power supply (usually black on black but it's still legible enough).
Failing that, I'm stuck with yet another "Celestial Happy Power Co (ROC)" gadget with no obvious clue as to what it's supposed to be paired with. I sometimes experimented which has on several occasions let the magical smoke out and finally decided on my current methodology which has proved to be effective so far.
May contain traces of nut.
Made from the freshest electrons.
The wall-wart contains the circuitry that converts 110vac/240vac to low voltage DC. Killing the wall wart means that same circuitry goes into the device, meaning that devices will now be larger by the size of the wall wart.
It's worse than that, the device would now have to comply with the standards of individual countries power authorities, rather than just the plug-pak (aka wallwart) having to comply. Making mobile phones or digital cameras comply with double-insulated standards would be a nightmare.
I haven't noticed this being an issue since switchmode power supplies being used inside plugpaks. The older ones that housed 50Hz transformers were a problem for this, and sucked at regulation too.
You make one device for every region and package a different AC adapter for each. Its simple, easy and makes things work.
Personally I'd just like to see maximum size limitations on them -- if it weighs more than "x" make it a power block (sits on floor with normal power cable, like laptops usually have), etc.
- Michael T. Babcock (Yes, I blog)
There is one big plus when using external power-adapters; When the original one dies outside of warranty, you can simply get another.
What's really needed, though, is to get the producers of wall warts to give them a cord and a hole for wall-mounting.
The really annoying thing about most wall warts today is that you can't use all the outlets, since most are too bulky.
/.Mattsson - My native language is not English, so please don't whine over linguistic errors. (That's lame anyway...)
That's pretty old news, actually. The European Union already convinced phone makers to agree on a standard charger a few months ago.
Say out loud: I'm an Aspie and I'm somewhat proud, I guess. Uh. Can I write an email in all caps instead? Hm...
I do this as well, though I've graduated to a label maker for legibility. I also check the device itself, and if it only has a polarity indicator or is just marked "DC IN" I stick a label there as well, identifying exactly what volts/amps the wall wart is spec'ed at.
http://marsandmore.com - Posters of space, spacecraft, and astronomy.
Spoilsport !
Doing things like that takes all the fun out of it.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"