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Micro-USB Cellphone Charger Becomes EU Standard
An anonymous reader writes "The European Commission has put into effect a June 2009 agreement stating that major cellphone manufacturers should standardize their charging/data connection ports to the popular Micro-USB format. CEN-CENELEC and ETSI provided the standards by which these 14 companies will abide to make cell phone recharging and data transfer easy." Apple may even bring the next-gen iPad along for the ride.
I wish they would do this in the US. It's dumb that each company has their own chargers.
The claim that iPad 2 will have Micro-USB port in TFA hinges on this:
The most recent rumor, courtesy of the Mobile Review blog editor-in-chief Eldar Murtazin, says the iPad 2 will include a USB port. ...
AppleInsider reports that Murtazin is a trusted insider with good sources
That's as incorrect as it goes. He's an "editor-in-chief" of an organization that consists of precisely one person, namely him; and he is well known in Russian Internet community specifically for making wild and unsubstantiated predictions, often also claiming "insider info". The majority don't come true. So if that's the only source of that information, I would be wary about its correctness.
That said, if EU mandates micro-USB, it would seem that Apple won't get much choice there for iPhone, and then it would make sense for them to align the rest of the line-up with it, even if the law doesn't apply there. So it doesn't take an insider to make an educated guess here.
So, are they legally allowed to recess the port in such a fashion that only the official cables can reach the "standard" Micro-USB port, or is that just a mistake on Samsung's part? (It's pretty much my only gripe with the phone FWIW.)
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In fact, I'd not seen a device which had one before a few months ago when a couple of phones started to use it. Mini-USB has been the standard for years and is only fractionally larger whilst being much stronger.
I would suggest that that has been the primary reason for this choice - to continue the decades old tradition of delicate connectors to facilitate the upgrade path.
Didn't they mandate this back in late 2006. What the heck took the EU so long?
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
As opposed to forcing you to buy a 30$ charger and a 15$ charger cable from every single handset producer?
This is so ridiculously obvious that lots of libertarians will scream murder. Forcing a standard down our throat, oh the arrogance! I will only buy phones with a different connector just out of spite!
thegodmovie.com - watch it
It has always been a bit of a limitation that officially you can only draw 500mA at 5V from a USB port, especially when FireWire can provide between 18 to 30V at up to 1A or more - leading to ridiculous things like a portable hard drive that requires two USB connectors - one for data and power, the other to draw more power, when a single FireWire cable will do.
I know apple has got around this with the dropping of FireWire support on the iPod line (and all subsequent 30 pin dock connector products) by having a "smart" USB charger that can detect the presence of an iPhone or other such device that can handle increased current on the USB connector (thus technically breaking the spec) (and I know it's not really smart as such, probably just a couple of resistors and a sensing circuit)
Either way, it's an issue as batteries get ever higher in capacity in ever smaller devices - charging them back up is a pain!
It's mandatory. I'm not sure if it was actually a law or "if you cellphone manufacturers don't work this out, we'll make it a law"-kinda situation. But I do remember that they were left not much of a choice.
Normally, I would agree with you: let demand meet supply. But somehow, this hasn't worked in the cellphone industry. In my company we have about 50 cellphones, all of them Nokia's. For some reason, these phones have 4 different types of charger connectors. With a simple converter cable ( http://tinyurl.com/39xhy98 ), we don't have to replace chargers that are built in cars.
If an 8-year old adapter can be used on any nokia phone as long as you use the right converter cable, I can't think of a reason to switch connectors except for selling more spare adapters. Sure, they can improve the cable once in a few years, if they actually improve it. But I wouldn't call switching from a 2.50mm connector to a 2.45mm connector an improvement, but rather making it incompatible on purpose.
.sig: No such file or directory
Someone forgot to tell Nokia that. The micro usb in the N900 seems to be rated for 100 insertions, if you are lucky.
http://slashdot.org/submission/1180314/Nokia-N900-Hardware-failure---USB-port-falling-off
Did they fix the position and allow easy pluggable possibilities so you can have a cradle or car adapter?
No, of course they did not.
Atari rules... ermm... ruled.
I'm all for a single kind of connector for all kinds of devices, but... try plugging a micro USB into your phone or gps using only one hand in the dark. Now try the same with a round plug. I much prefer the latter. Micro USB seems to be much more difficult to insert, but maybe it's just me.
Considering that they can't even make a standard mini-jack for audio without crippling to only accept their authorized accessories, I would say option 1. If they can't sway enough then option 2 obviously.
OTOH, those devices are very often seen as USB devices to plug into computers, with huge memory capabilities, therefore providing a cheap and standard way to transfer data is certainly a good idea.
In Soviet Russia, our new overlords are belong to all your base.
Someone is gouing to have to spend some time in cell block number 9.
Of course, in the USA, consumers have no rioghts, because APPL has bought them all.
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Now, if we could just get Apple to release the Patents on MagSafe, so we could use this for all laptop...
What I don't understand is how they got a patent on MagSafe in the first fucking place. Somewhere around here I have a cord from a waffle iron or something that is based on two contacts and a magnet. It appears to be bakelite and thus from the 1980s at the latest. The last time I knew where it was my camera's batteries were dead, because it apparently won't charge NiMH batteries from the wall wart, so I have to keep cycling sets through a charger.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Afaict 5V is about right for charging a single lithium ion/polymer cell. Go much higher and unless you use a switched mode converter you are just wasting more power. Go much lower and you don't have enough headroom to charge it properly. Most of the phone "chargers" I saw seemed to be tending to 5V output even before the use of a USB connector came on scene.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
Cell phone manufacturer had a chance to get it right, but for years they chose to use custom connectors and make a killing selling overpriced chargers and cables.
Sometimes the invisible hand of the market needs a little nudging from the mighty foot of the state.
Because I find it annoying that motorola phones at the very least won't charge on my PC. Sure, they've got a mini-usb connector but when I plug it in the phone complains that it's not a valid charger because I don't have some driver installed. (And I can't find the right one for Win64. My K-Rzr was like that too but I managed to find a driver for it.)
Did you know 80 to 90% of the moderators on slashdot wouldn't recognize a troll even if one dragged them under a bridge.
and either refusing to charge or deliberately drawing less power when you detect the wrong charger.
One could argue based on the power management portions of the USB specification that drawing less power meets the spec, but refusing to charge does not. A device MUST NOT* draw more than one unit of current (100 mA in USB 2.0) until it successfully associates to the host controller. After a device is configured, it MAY request up to five units (500 mA) but MUST NOT draw more than the host says is available. The recent Battery Charging v1.2 spec specifies a protocol on the data lines that devices can use to detect dumb chargers and chargers that can provide more power, so that devices know when they MAY deliberately draw more power. You SHOULD support manufacturers of phones and other devices that support USB Battery Charging.
* RFC 2119 modal adverbs != shouting.
Camera manufacturers have been making weather-resistant DSLRs for years now (there have been well known instances where entire EOS 1Ds and EOS 7D Canon DSLR+Lenses combinations have been dunked into 3' of sea water and continued working without any problem), and they have a lot more connectors to contend with as well as a couple of microphones and speakers. It should not be difficult at all for phone manufacturers to start offering water-resistant smartphones.
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
I found out accidentally that LG phones standardized on micro-USB sometime within the last few years, and never looked back; family has 4 current LGs, several older ones (as backups), and they all fit the same charger. Opted out of other brands (bb esp) because of charger issue — hotel staff always have micro-USB chargers if you left yours at home.
Good to know HTC is standardized on m-USB too. They should advertise that $hit.
An EU standard means the following in practice:
The Germans will complain that everyone else does it inefficiently.
The Austrians will tell the Germans how to do it.
The Spanish will promise to do it tomorrow.
The Greeks will fake the documentation saying they've done it.
The Dutch will give parents and same-sex partners time off to do it.
The Czechs will charge foreigners extra for it.
Nobody will have any idea what the Portuguese are doing about it.
The Luxembourgers will interview everyone else on the radio about it.
The French will block the roads protesting about it.
The Danes will claim to have done it a thousand years ago.
The Swedes will only do it for six months a year.
The Polish will blame the Romanians and Hungarians for not doing it, or doing it too much, or not quite right.
The Maltese will earn a medal for it.
The Irish will invest their whole economy in it.
The Scottish will demand a subsidy to do it.
The Welsh won't do it until it's translated into a language that only people in Herefordshire and Shropshire actually use.
The English will do it immediately but moan about it forever after.
Turkey will pass a law making it illegal to do it in a headdress. The rest of the EU still won't let them join their club.
Andrew Oakley - www.aoakley.com
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Universal_Serial_Bus#Durability
"The newer Micro-USB receptacles are designed for up to 10,000 cycles of insertion and removal between the receptacle and plug, compared to 1500 for the standard USB and 5000 for the Mini-USB receptacle. This is accomplished by adding a locking device and by moving the leaf-spring connector from the jack to the plug, so that the most-stressed part is on the cable side of the connection. This change was made so that the connector on the less expensive cable would bear the most wear instead of the more expensive micro-USB device."
We both said a lot of things that you are going to regret.
Does the spec detail exactly how a device wanting more than 100mA of power gets it when it's plugged into an adaptor rather than a computer?
There is a USB Battery Charging Spec. It specifies how a dedicated charging port (which can be bower brick with a USB-A port, or something with a permanently attached cable) shall act to be USB compliant.
But AFAICT, if phone from Vendor A draws 800mA and your PSU is rated at 500mA - well, if it's been designed without any sort of protection (quite possible on a cheap & nasty adaptor) - that's the end of that.
Adapters without even basic current limiting are illegal in many countries, so in practice all adapters have at least basic current limiting. Basic current limiting drops the voltage when trying to draw more than the desired current. The cheap systems will still provide more current, but will do so at a lower voltage, so the net result is still safe. The more expensive ones will keep dropping the voltage until the device draws the rated maximum current.
A device simply either accepts the reduced voltage, or it cuts back on the current demand to get the full voltage. All real charging circuits in phones will drop the current demand if the voltage goes too low, so this all just works.
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