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Big Backing For 'Universal Stylus' Campaign (bbc.com)
Google has backed an effort to standardise touch-screen styluses so they can be used on many devices. From a report: The Universal Stylus Initiative (USI) was launched, in 2015, to encourage companies to produce styluses that work on rivals' products Dell, Intel, Lenovo, LG and graphics tablet-maker Wacom have all backed the project. However, Apple, Microsoft and Samsung have not. One expert suggested the big brands would keep their proprietary pens. Styluses designed to work with modern touch-screen devices and graphics tablets usually contain sensors to detect pressure, movement and orientation of the pen.
and I thought there was an Apple bias?
The problem with these kinds of standards is that they usually settle on the cheapest, crappiest thing. MicroUSB is the perfect example, exploding/burning/shorting chargers are another one.
Lightning, Thunderbolt and especially USB-C are better examples, with companies behind it that have at least some level of QC.
There's nothing somebody else in China can't manufacture a bit cheaper and a bit crappier and a bit more dangerous for the end-user.
Windows 2000 - from the guys who brought us edlin
Google is not a player in this game, and be honest I really doubt they give a damn what gets developed as a "standard" Googles stance has EVERYTHING to do with attacking Apple and Microsoft. From reviews I have read both these companies have good pens/tech and they work very well. This is tech google does not have, so why not force these companies to either share or get labeled as "non-standard" even if that standard is inferior. this "standard" is by companies trying to stay relevant.
Nonsense. If companies decide that the standard isn't good enough, they can improve the standard, just like the USB consortium did with USB-C.
IMO, if Apple had pushed for improvements to the standard instead of going off on their own with Lightning, we wouldn't have two incompatible standards right now. After all, I think everybody had concluded that micro-USB was fundamentally unreliable by the time Lightning came out, and they were looking for a replacement by that point anyway. The idea of making a reversible connector might have been borrowed from Apple (no idea about the timeline for that decision), but it certainly wasn't the primary driver for replacing micro-USB.
In fact, if Apple had stuck with the standards and pushed to improve those standards rather than using the 30-pin dock connector way back in the day, there's a good chance we'd have gotten a USB-C-like connector many years earlier, instead of the disaster that micro-USB turned out to be.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
It is absolutely proprietary. USB is not open and free.
Actually it is open, you can download the spec from here. Also it is free of charge, you can pay for a VID ($5000USD) and you can pay to license the logo ($3500USD) but you can also do as many do and if you need a VID use 0xF055.
You can use the USB connector freely. You can't put the trademark logo on a device that hasn't paid for the logo license and passed USB-IF compliance testing. It's a nice loophole for hobbyists that want something totally free and off-the-shelf.
If you're manufacturing devices, it's a single fee without a per device charge. This is different from something like FireWire which was open spec, but the trademarked names and logos cost a $1 per device. (or $1 per port?). FireWire is an open standard (IEEE 1394-1995) but an official copy of the standard is $335.00 for IEEE members (membership is $35/year).
Really proprietary stuff means you can't even buy the components to build a connector or cable without an agreement from the manufacturer or custom manufacturer.
But perhaps you have a different definition of proprietary than the rest of us have. If so, please explain it.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire