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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."
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.
20% less cool and half the amps..
Not a huge problem for your iPhone probably. But definitely a problem for your iPad.
And literally (really literally not emphatically literally) the iPad chargers are not less cool. They get pretty warm :-)
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
constantly breaking old accessories like apple does
Updating their charger interface *ONE* time in the entire history of iPods is now "constantly"? My my, how the narrative changes with just one word.
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.
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I had a micro USB connector break on my phone recently. The phone was just under four years old (Samsung Vibrant) so I got a new one, but removing the old connector from the vibrant, cutting up the old cable and soldering it straight to the board where the cable used to be let me get my last week's data off. Replacing the micro USB connector would have been easy enough, they're jellybean parts. Four years, assuming I only plugged it in/removed the plug twice a day, is 2920 uses. I actually probably came near 4x that, so about 11k insertion/removals. Micro USB is designed for 10k, so it very likely outlasted its design lifetime.
Not a sentence!
I must have been holding it wrong, right?!?!
Well let's put it this way. MicroUSB connectors were designed specifically so that the plug was sacrificial. I use them a lot for hobby electronics, and my phones I use at work for convenient usb storage. I would on average plug them in 10+ times per day. I have had a lot of the cables fail, like they are supposed to, but I've never seen a device itself fail.
Anyway this is all beside the point. I'll open the floor back to you to tell us what alternative plug you can suggest. Only criteria is that it has a current carrying capacity higher than 1A, is capable of supporting high speed data transfer, can be easily centred and inserted without looking and is no more than 3mm high.
By the way I assume you took the device to get repaired right? I mean surely you didn't throw it out or replace it because a $0.60 component (in single quantities), which any competent soldering iron user could replace, broke right?
If you didn't then shame on you.
Micro-USB may be better than many alternatives, but it's still a poor choice. It's tiny and polarized, so it's hard to see which way it needs to be oriented, particularly in poor lighting. That's a rather common problem. Why couldn't they get it right?
In contrast, Apple's Lightning connector works the same in either orientation.
Right. Humanity has gotten so d@mn lazy that - in case of not being able to see the correct orientation - rotating the plug by 180 is too f'ing hard to do ... ... e.g., as you mentioned it - micro USB cable: ~1-2$. Lightning cable: ~20$
Sorry, but many of proprietary "advances" are just ways of securing companies' income, with minimal advantages for the customer