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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 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.'
That's just what the current USB standard says a port must provide.
But it doesn't stop a wall charger from providing as much as the cable can bear, which has got to be quite a bit more.
Apple have already signed an agreement and stated they will be using a standard micro-usb socket on the iPhones in the future. I believe Apple will introduce this socket in 2010.
Source: http://uk.reuters.com/article/idUKTRE55S1XZ20090629
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!
Because ITU members would otherwise be working on world peace?
Because the UN was never given the power to mandate an electronic design. They can offer an opinion (recommendation) but that's it.
Nor should the UN make that grab for power, because once you go down that road, eventually the UN will start mandating what kind of roof you can install on your house. It's bad enough I have Congress telling me how much corn/potatoes I can or cannot grow in my own backyard. They were never granted that power under the Constitution, but since the mid-1930s they've exercised the power. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wickard_v._Filburn
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
By using micro USB, they did paint themselves in a corner for the 5 volts. However, the current provided has to be a minimum of 500mA according to the USB specs.
Having a power adapter able to supply more than 500mA won't blow up anything since the device should also work within spec and work with a minimum of 500mA.
Chargers being able to supply 5 volts at 2A won't blow up anything and recharge devices four times faster, if required/supported by the device. If not, the device will only take 500mA and the charger just won't be working at its full capacity of 2A.
I wonder if the new phone charger standard mentions a "from 500mA up to X amps" specification or not.
- Wikipedia
Not all phones will recharge this way without extra work. A co-worker and I just had a look at his new Blackberry, which refused to charge from his laptop unless proprietary software was also installed, and it refused to work with a discharged battery until at least 10 minutes after he first reconnected power and it had recharged the battery somewhat. Every other phone or portable device I've worked with worked _immediately_ after providing external power.
Standards are helpful, and I'd love to see a drop in the number of stupid adapters on the shelves of hardware stores and Staples, but amazingly stupid behavior like that Blackberry's can still be layered on top of good standards.
Hell, no! ITU has a known history of
a) writing unreadable standards (such as G.711, the a-law, mu-law telephony codec)
b) retarded protocols (H.323, where messages are formatted according to an hierarchy defined in 3+ different standards, and call initiation sequences have so many alternatives that it is common to have two certified H.323 endpoints refuse to talk to each other. Implementing H.323 involves thousands of lines of code. While SIP (a non-ITU protocol) uses text headers similar to email and http, can be understood from a single RFC and can be correctly implemented in a few hundred lines.)
c) favoring patented cash troll codecs such as G.729 instead of similar patent-free ones. (Meanwhile, a lot of international phone traffic is performed in roughly-uncompressed G.711, using 10x the bandwidth because the licensing fees of G.729 are outrageous)
That's ITU for you, and these people should be forbidden from publishing any standard whatsoever.