Slashdot Mirror
EU Committee Votes To Make All Smartphone Vendors Utilize a Standard Charger
Deathspawner writes "The EU has been known to make a lot of odd decisions when it comes to tech, but one committee's latest vote is one that most people will likely agree with: Standardized smartphone chargers. If passed, this decision would cut down on never having the right charger handy, but as far as the EU is concerned, this is all about a reduction of waste. The initial vote went down on Thursday, and given its market saturation, it seems likely that micro USB would be the target standard. Now, it's a matter of waiting on the EU Parliament to make its vote."
This bill had better have an expiration date, or else it might well interfere with new technologies like (perhaps) wireless power transmission.
Apple is safe. Only the charger needs to be USB, they can still use a proprietary connector on the device. I'm still surprised the EU hasn't gone after them for breaking 3rd party cables though.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
How will my iPhone possibly work if it has to be charged with a tool as common as a wall wart? Eeeww. It's 20% less cool than a Lightning cable!
John
I'm laughing like hell.
Manufacturers can still keep their bottom line by making cables and connectors so bad they have to be replaced even more often than before. As a matter of fact, I think that already happened.
and the USB connectors SUCK. All of them.
as much as I dislike iTunes, the lightning connector makes up for it all. Can't they standardize on that one rather than something that's 15 years old ?
I thought there was an international law against governing bodies making common sense decisions?
Someone is going to receive a very sternly written letter.
I fully support this, and a side-effect that I'm leaning on for one of my energy-efficiency projects (see @OpenTRV) is a supply of cheap efficient commodity 5V micro-USB supplies.
Rgds
Damon
http://m.earth.org.uk/
"[...]but as far as the EU is concerned, this is all about a reduction of waste"
I wonder how many times they shuffled between Strasbourg and Bruxelles while they decided that I do not need three 15 EUR chargers.
"If a boss demands loyalty, give him integrity. But if he demands integrity, give him loyalty." (John Boyd, 1927-1997)
Sadly..... this'll mean they just don't come with chargers anymore...
See: DVD players with no HDMI (and back in teh day SCART)( cables; See the Nintendo DS's SKU's which come iwthout chargers.... etc
- http://www.milkme.co.uk
No need to legislate this. Most people I know go out of their way to avoid buying products that don't charge with a USB connector if they can avoid it - at least computer-related products.
Me, the last device I bought with a special charger was a Casio Exilim camera that has unique enough features that I had no other choice. But I hate that charger each time I have to carry it with me on business trips when I already carry a USB charger that takes care of all my other devices.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
I thought Micro-USB was already the required charging standard for phones in the EU?
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
There are millions of people that have iPhones, none of them are your friends? This whole "must be chargeable with micro USB" was already mandatory in the EU, they are just changing the regulations so you don't need an adapter like the iPhone currently requires. They had to, because evidently vendors weren't having it and found ways around it, so yes, there really is a need to legislate this.
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
Get the USB group to ban people from bastardizing the USB spec.
There is NO REASON AT ALL for those stupid chargers. NONE. Well, besides making money.
It annoyed me on PSVita as well, the charging for it is such a pain in the dick, seriously.
Try to put it in hub, will not charge. EVER HEARD OF TAKING WHAT YOU ARE GIVEN? CHARGE DAMN IT, THE USB SPEC SAYS SO.
And the USB charger itself, the adapter, the bit where you plug the USB section in, it has this little plastic bit on both sides that prevent you from putting a standard USB cable in. (unless you slice it off like I did)
I now just use my PSVIta chargers adapter for everything else now, exact same damn thing anyway.
The USB group should be the ones doing this, not the EU.
All it is doing is crapping all over the spec with stupid crap that the entire spec was AGAINST in the first place!
USB was supposed to be the thing that killed all others, the one spec to rule them all, now it is going backwards with all these stupid plugs and sockets.
I am fine with companies working together to create these extensions to specs and work together to create something better, but just doing a Microsoft on it is dickish at best.
who know less than nothing about engineering, making engineering decisions. Next thing you know these idiotic politicians will also extend their stupid mandates to other areas of technology. It appears that in some ways, European politicians are even stupider than the ones we have over here in the states. Standards should be come up with by engineers who know what they are doing, rather than politicians. I do not think for a minute that the engineers at Apple changed the connector on their iDevices for no good reasons. If politicians legislate in this area, they can do nothing less than stifle technology and innovation.
A sufficiently advanced simulation is indistinguishable from reality.
At first glance this is a fantastic idea, but it may not have been thought out all the way. I like micro usb chargers and even as an Apple fan was dismayed when they developed lighting instead of going micro usb. However Apple did have good reason to develop the lighting port - it's much more than a charging port. This is slashdot and we talk about Apple enough that I am sure enough of you understand what makes the lighting port leaps and and bounds more advanced the micro usb. Therein lies the problem. Technology is moving forward faster and faster and in a matter of time the obsolescence of the micro usb charger will rear its head as new technologies demand something with more advanced capabilities. It's all well and good for many reasons to have a standard port, but this cannot happen without a plan to reconvene every five years to settle on a new industry wide port with more capabilities. This of course brings us right back to the waste issue, and demanding a stop-gap generation of phones that support micro usb and whatever is next would be too costly for manufacturers. We can't live on micro usb forever and so the problem comes back full circle. In this situation adapters are not practical and are too easy to loose. If we are going to have a standard port, we need to first come up with something wicked advanced that will last as long as micro usb has and then go through a period of extreme waste with some recycling as we move over. It would be nice if Apple would just open up their lighting port for everyone to implement - but that of course will not happen. In other words: I sure as hell don't know what to do about the situation.
Brought to you by Carl's Junior.
Got a new charger design that is smaller? More durable? Magnetic? Easier to plug in the dark? Compatible with an odd form factor?
Well too bad. That is illegal. The standard charger is the only charger. Yours ist verbotten in die Grosser Deutschland.
Standardization of chargers has largely taken place already. You have Apple devices with Lightning connectors and the rest which pretty much use micro USB.
Personally, I prefer Lightning.
Also, I'm sure that further improvements will be made (which government-mandated standardization will make more difficult).
These comments are mine; I do not speak for my employer.
The big problem with this idea is how do manufacturers migrate to better technology once enough people realize how much USB is crap technology?
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
I'd rather see all the other manufacturers switching to the solid, less breakable than USB, invertible, plug that Apple are using
That's fine 19 years from now when the Lightning connector patent expires. So what do you recommend between now and then?
A fine idea.
What about laptop chargers too ? Every laptop I've owned has had a different charger plug. In some cases machines made by the same manufacturer have different plugs. Have a set of standard charger ratings and a standard way for the laptop to detect it.
This is just making mandatory the Common External Power Supply EU standard. That's been a voluntary standard since 2009, and most cell phone vendors in Europe have been on board for years. It's simple enough - phones use a MicroUSB B connector, and chargers use a USB-A connector if they have a connector at the charger end.
China standardized on MicroUSB-B back in 2007. The GSM consortium standardized on MicroUSB-B in 2009.
Interesting...
Didn't everybody in Europe switch to Micro USB a couple of years ago?
I've still got a couple of devices that have Micro USB but don't seem to use it for charging. My GPS has a cradle with a proprietary connector that's fed by a Mini USB from a cigarette lighter adapter, and while it has Micro USB for a data interface, it can almost run from that but doesn't actually charge (as you might guess, I know this because the Mini USB on the back of the cradle is broken.) And I've got a Coby Android tablet that has a little ~1.5(?)mm charger which runs on 5V; it could perfectly well run off a USB wall or cigarette lighter adapter if it didn't have the proprietary cable, and it also has the "USB will keep it sort of running but not charge the battery" feature.
It doesn't matter as much for cell phones, but I wish everything could use a power cord like the Apple Mac laptop magnetic-disconnect ones. Of course, every new generation of laptop seems to want more voltage than the previous ones; I've seen them go from 12 to 14 to 16 to 19. (Sigh - if they could still use 12V we could just use simple car adapters, instead of 12V->110V->19V.)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Doesn't that end all innovation with power supply input form factors?
Or does it mean if you invent a new, better form factor - you still have to fit a micro-USB (if there's room) and make sure your device works with that.
We even let politicians / beaurocrats decide what charger to use on our mobile devices – are we truly that utterly useless? Tear down this illusion of democracy and accept the fact - we are to stupid to decide on which telephones to buy (market driven economics should provide the optimum charger interface) and therefor we're not competent to elect politicians either. Fuck this.
Having a 30w laptop plugged into a 120w brick shouldn't damage the laptop, it just means the power brick won't be running at full efficiency. All you really need to do is regulate the voltage, socket, and polarity, maybe adding a minimum sustained current that the brick has to be able to handle (so manufacturers know the bricks will be able to supply at least 60w, for example).
I have an iDevice, I don't need no usb, thankyouverymuch!
It's #927 in case you're wondering.
I was more thinking there could be a range of standard PSU sizes ie. 30W, 75W, 90W, 150W etc.
I have a note 2. Its a great device, but requires at least 1 amp to trickle charge.
Very often I am stuck traveling, or otherwise am away from the charger for more than 36 hrs. One night, during an a power outage, I needed to find a car charger. Sort thru the 5000 idevice charger for one rated 1 amp, with a microusb cord. Plug in my device, 500mah usb charge. Yup, it was designed for the apple 'standard' voltage acroessdata, instead of data shorted. Completely useless ewaste
Or do we need mother government to also dictate the power output so we don't accidentally burn up all our devices, houses and cars too?
Hey here's an idea - why not mandate a single standard hardware platform and form factor for everything because lord knows, the EU, which has today an 80 page specification for the steering wheel of a bus is the best place to go for something like this.
Mini-usb.
I had a V3M for like 4-6 years without a problem (having migrated from a Nokia when they moved to CDMA from... AMPS?) and even more than not having any problems with the device connector, I *NEVER* had problems with the cables. In the past 3-4 years I've owned micro-usb devices I've had: 1 device shatter it's connector (was too light and got sent flying while still attached to the connector. Fixable but I haven't gotten a chance to find the exact model connector on it yet.), at least 3 cables fail (all internally, connectors don't seem to be the issue.), at least two device-end connectors randomly go intermittent, one 'normal' micro-usb and one of the USB 3.0 micro-usb connectors (which have so far proven to be the worst adapter ever since the casing around the connector is heavier than the connector itself can comfortably handle without causing it to abnormally loosen itself or the device's female connector, the latter problem doesn't seem to happen if you use the USB 2.0 micro-usb cable in place of the 3.0 one either, lending it to being an issue with the larger connector.)
Regardless I'd really appreciate the micro-usb standard dying and a more robust connector (like mini-usb) taking its place, even if it does require the formfactors to stop shrinking in order to accomodate a more physically robust standardized connector. But that's just my 2 cents and it seems obvious that whoever is deciding these things doesn't take 'practicality' into consideration in regards to a standardized connector.
But all the phones use different amounts of power. I just read today that while the google nexus uses a USB mini connector for power, the to versions 2012 and 2013 use different wattages, and are somewhat incompatible.
And yes a lot of this is just BS to get more money, but smartphones are not all the same, and this is good. Their is a wide range, and their is some necessary differences in their batteries and their charging cables.
Also, I use micro USB, and it kindof sucks.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
... to charge via USB port??
.... since the top reason would be to CHARGE and USE the device while riding.
Some people are too dumb to even think about something simple.
Not that the EU passed a law... I get that... its just sad that they needed to do that.
The vendors should have created their own standards a long time ago to not be this obnoxious. Every phone needs a new charger even though practically all of them are just USB. But they all have a different type of USB connector which is different for no apparent reason.
Look, obviously there are times and reasons to have different types of charges. But they seem to go out of their way to confuse the situation.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
It's about government control, it always has been.
This is not about being able to plug to a USB plug to charge. We already have that with pretty much every single device in the market today.
What they are proposing is forcing Apple (and everybody else) to have a micro-USB port on the devices and use it as the primary recharge connection.
In other words, they want all devices to use the crappiest of connection known today.
... two weak ports are much better than having a single, more robust port that does everything??
Only fanboy morons think that using 2 ports is better than a single port.
... the issue only affects the plug format.
I'm guessing you have no idea about:
- Device shape
- Power requirements
- Data transfer limits
- Heat distribution
- Manufacturing designs
And that is just a small list of items that are DIRECTLY affected by forcing mini-USB ,,, which have HUGE limitations compared to anything else available today.
You can already charge your iPhone wirelessly - in a microwave oven!
Honestly MicroUSB is crap and reality be told APPLE did have a good idea. Just have them demand a double sided 4 pin connector that can be plugged in both ways and NOT EASILY DAMAGED like garbage micro-usb.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Micro-USB may be better than many alternatives, but it's still a poor choice. It's tiny and polarized, so it's hard to see which way it needs to be oriented, particularly in poor lighting. That's a rather common problem. Why couldn't they get it right?
In contrast, Apple's Lightning connector works the same in either orientation.
But they need to make sure there is a clause requiring the port to be ON the device and not handled through an adapter from whatever the law ends up specifying as standard to the proprietary connector on the device. That way you dont need to carry around the adapter in order to just charge anywhere.
Oh and it needs to be extended not just to smartphone vendors but to vendors of dumbphones, MP3 players, GPS devices and tablets too. (99.9% of non-Apple MP3 players that dont use regular batteries are already using either miniusb or microusb anyway so only Apple would have to make any changes to their product I suspect)
I thought this already happened. Isn't this why we're on MicroUSB? Outside of Apple who isn't using micro usb? even apple I think had to create an adapter to micro usb? or was it B-usb to be "complaint"
Just another second banana
A giant tangled mass that takes a hour to look through to see which charger works with your phone.
Definitely needed.
The goal is to prevent waste on the charging system side of things. As long as the device plugs into the wall standardises by providing a consistent interface to the other end it doesn't matter what you do from there.
Case in point my wireless charger has ... *drumroll* ... a microUSB socket for connecting to the wall. The phone sits on the charging matt and the matt has to get power from somewhere right?
Ultimately as long as some adapted method is provided to allow the use of microUSB wall chargers who cares if they standardise on that, providing phones don't go nuts and suddenly need like 10A or something which the socket can't physically handle.
Didn't Chinese manufacturers try to standardize on Mini-USB a few years ago?
Give Apple a beating! They went out of their way to make their charger incompatible. Just another pile of crap to fill landfills and give shareholders another half cent per share. IBM took a beating when microchannel was expensive and everyone else went with PCI. PCI was not quite as good at first, but non-proprietary. Instead of begging IBM and paying through the nose, we all have PCI (and PCIe). Rinse repeat with RAMBUS. Apple luvs soaking people with their proprietary crap. They need a beating. They shouldn't be forced to change their charger though. Its just that if they don't, then they don't get to sell their crap in Europe, that's all.
I have a HD camcorder. The charger is proprietary. It dose the amazingly complex thing of supplying 8.4 VDC at 1.5 amps. The battries are proprietary too. They supply 7.4 VDC at 890mAh.
Not common (and I think I know why) but not out of the realm of cobbling up something to match. However, any aftermarket parts just don't work. Why? Because they don't have the all holy and copyright/trademarked "protection" of geniuine equipment which would "degrade" my user experience. Never mind that a simple battery for this camcorders costs retail $190USD, while the price of the parts is nearer to $12.
And while we are about tilting at windmills, let's go after ink cartridges. I wouldn't mind paying $400 for a printer, if I could get ink packs for it for less than $130 per month to print about 200 pages.
Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.
IEEE UPAMD/P1823
http://grouper.ieee.org/groups/msc/upamd/&%238364;Z
But for some reason it has been completely silent since start of draft vote a year ago.
You can do that, as long as device makers know that 30w is the minimum. Using an underated power supply should just mean that the battery will take longer to charge (and in some cases, that the laptop can't run on mains power, but can slowly charge from it).
Doesn't anyone else remember a similar ruling a few years back in the EU, but apple managing to skirt it that time by offering the 30-pin to MicroUSB adapter, and then subsequently releasing the same adapter for the new lightning pin connector? The thing that really needs to happen is that phone manufacturers need to be forced to utilize open source/copyright-free connectors, and prevent requirements of licensing fees. This will generate two effects: Apple and other companies that try to follow its profitability chain will lose the incentive to create and utilize proprietary connectors (since they will not see monetary gain from it), and phone manufacturers can follow suit with better adapted connectivity designs in the future. Innovation will come freely then.
Having a 30w laptop plugged into a 120w brick shouldn't damage the laptop, it just means the power brick won't be running at full power.
FTFY. (It's often the case that not running at full power allows a device to be more efficient.)
"Little does he know, but there is no 'I' in 'Idiot'!"
So plenty of BMW (Bitching, Moaning & Whining) in this thread.
But it's actualy a good idea.
Since there's absolutely nothing, repeat nothing, to stop Apple or anyone else having a micro-USB port on their device AND another connector.
Like Lightening, or whatever else they want....
Then bundling the specific cable/charger, (with better specs, high amps etc. if required) into the package.
Again, if they want, and customer is prepared to pay.
What's the marginal cost of having two connectors, especially for a product costing upwards of $500, $750?
Damn all.
Or is this motivated unreasoning?
If you have a propriatory connector and you get a new device, if it has a different propriatory connector, you have to buy a new connector and throw away the old one.
If it has the same propriatory connector, you now have two and ought to throw away th other one as redundant.
And cables will last longer than devices using them, especially phones where many change them every three years or less.
That's a lot of cables needing to be thrown away with every device thrown away.
HOWEVER if they all use the same one, then you can sell without a cable and you can get generic cables at market-competition-level prices (i.e. marginal cost) and then all these extra cables aren't needed.
NOTE: if no device was thrown away, then you'd be rigt: there would be no waste. However, since that would mean that we'd have at least one phone per person within 6 years, that would kill the market for phones in that time, apart from manufacturing failures and damage (which would happen more to the device than the cable, necessitating more cables thrown away than needed).
So, the question is this: are you REALLY that stupid, or is this just a way to go "APPLE ARE RIGHT!!! DO NOT TELL THEM WHAT TO DO EURO-COMMIES!!!!"?
The EU is free to pay a licensing fee to make a USB adapter for my proprietary charging system. but I wouldn't waste the money. Besides it really is a Personal Digital Assistant with phone capabilities.
There have been quite a few people here saying that USB connectors are designed so that, if something breaks, it is the cable and not the connector.
Can you clarify and/or illustrate this further?
In my experience, the complete opposite is true; i.e.It is the socket that is the weakest of the USB connectors, not the cable plug.
The problem is the 'tongue' that sticks out in the middle of the socket - It a brittle plastic block with the metal conductors on it and the vast majority of cases it is this tongue snapping off that is the cause for a connector failure.
This is incredibly common in school where students and teachers tend to be quote rough with their USB devices, often pushing them in and pulling them out at slight angles rather than dead-straight, or in some cases forcing them in upside down! (The stupid design of the socket leaves a small gap for the metal shroud of the plug, but this allows a determined idiot to force the plug in upside down!)
The cable connectors OTOH are fully supported on all sides by a metal shroud and have no floating contact points like the plug does and have proven to be much sturdier than the sockets. (The main failure mode of the cables seems to be the individual wires of the cable fracturing due to bending fatigue, but this is much rarer than the tongue snapping and is a natural wear-and-tear problem with all repeatedly-bent cables.)
I personally despise this trend toward wafer connectors on high-insertion/removal connectors; They are horrible and prone to snap damage unless the connector is very well reinforced and single-sided. Snapped SATA connectors were a very common issue, so much so that they had to add shrouding to the design to try and protect them from any bending as they have absolutely NO mechanical strength. AND they designed it the wrong way round; The socket should be on the ends, not the cable!
Even the Lightning connector, although designed correctly and far more sensibly than USB, is prone to having the cable-side wafer snapped off into the socket and it is very difficult to remove in that case.
The best and most robust sockets in my experience have been SCSI and Parallel-style centronics connectors, which can withstand ridiculous amounts of abuse without failing. Sadly their advantages have been outweighed by the single disadvantage - Complexity (And therefore cost) of manufacture, esp. in small sizes (The last centronics-style connector I saw was a micro-centronics connector on an old HP laser printer!)
Male/Female pin designs have also proven to be pretty robust where the pins are numerous and thick/stiff enough to withstand slide-bending (Better with e.g. 9-pin serial and 25-pin parallel, less so for IDE and VGA), but are no good for small connectors.
I personally like the facing-surface contact connectors used by some Apple laptop PSUs - No connectors to snap off, only spring loaded contacts which are held together by magnetic force.
That said, this wouldn't work so well with data devices since unexpected removal can wreck havok, but maybe a surface-contact connector with some sort of locking mechanism like you get with push-click SD card sockets? (But with auto-releasing under force to avoid damage from idiots just yanking them out)
This sounds to me an awful lot like a solution looking for a problem. Imagine if the government mandated that all computers must use parallel ports for external device connectivity. USB / 1394 may have taken much longer to be implemented.
We can't know where tech will be in 5 years! "Rules" such as this simply serve to make people feel good about themselves.
I'm all for standardization But really... USB? Its a crappy interface that provides poor charging speed and might not even provide enough power to run next gen devices let alone charge them. I'm also concerned as others have said that standardizing the interface may limit performance enhancements in the future. The EU have the right idea but they need to be careful to make sure the standard interface is future proofed and is regularly re-assessed for technical appropriateness.
because you are talking about the company, who sues competitors for matters as trivial as shape of cellphone corners. If it's not an open standard, then the "bunch of intrusive politicians" did what's expected from them by the people who voted them in.
The US Constitution gives the US Congress this power in Article I, Section 8. They have the power to regulate interstate commerce. I can think of very little else that will regulate (promote) interstate commerce better than making all the parts interchangable.
Yes, it can be done with cell phone charger. If Apple hates it, they can just add another connector to their next iPhone.
I wish it were done with cordless drill batteries. We need a standard for 1 cell, 2s cells, 5s2p cells, etc. All the 10.8V batteries for power tools (3s) should have the same connectors.
Note: 5s2p means 5 cells in series, 2 in parallel in a 10-cell pack.
Note: I'm talking about 18650 cells.
The private sector tried and failed a few decades back when "everyone" was going to use a standard Duracell battery pack in their laptops. The problem was the Duracell made a custom pack for EVERY laptop out there. If You want a 6 cell (3s2p) pack, it can be:
1. a flat -pack with all 6 cells lined up parallel to each other and in a plane, that plugs into the bottom of the laptop, or it can be:
2. 3 cells in a row, with 2 more next to them that plugs into the back of the laptop.
There is very little variation here.
With today's efficient, small, and cheap DC/DC converters, there is no need for wildy varying voltages. (I got a $40 DC/DC converter that takes in 8V-40V DC and puts out 12.0V DC. I use it in my cigarette lighter in my pickup so I don't damage electronics when my pickup starts.) Laptops can run off 10.8V (3s,) cell phones and handhelds can run off 3.7V (1s,) power tools can run off 18.0V (5s.)
While I'm ranting, when will someone make a cell phone that runs off a 123A or (better yet!) and 18650 battery? I have dozens of obsolete cell phone batteries laying around. The 18650 is THE standard for 3AH+ lithium cells. I guess some people would want little 1.5AH batteries, so they could use 123A (16340) cells.