Universal Phone Charger Approved By UN Body 220
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."
Re:Huh? (Score:3, Informative)
My last two digital cameras had mini-usb ports, neither was physically the same.
Re:Huh? (Score:2, Informative)
My last two digital cameras had mini-usb ports, neither was physically the same.
Then, by definition, they were not mini-usb ports.
Both Micro and MiniUSB jacks are standardized. If your two cameras didn't use a common connector, then there's a good chance that at least one of the two was using a proprietary jack for USB.
Finally EU (future) regulations can be useful (Score:1, Informative)
Remember this February news: http://mobile.slashdot.org/story/09/02/16/206213 [slashdot.org] "EU Commissioner Wants Standard For Mobile Phone Connectors"
Re:Great! (Score:3, Informative)
Well I'm not sure your comment makes a lot of sense, since you can already take your UK based charger (240v, 50Hz) to America and plug it in the nearest wall socket (110v, 60Hz) with a travel adaptor and it will work just fine! This is not a new thing, nearly all PSU's produced in the last 10-15 years have been light switch mode voltage converters rather than the older transformers which were heavy and expensive to make..
Re:Finally (Score:5, Informative)
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 [reuters.com]
Re:I hope Apple adopts this (Score:4, Informative)
Well, Nokia uses the Micro USB connector. And Sony Ericsson seems to be on board as well.
Just by market share alone [wirelessweek.com] those two make up more than 45% of the world wide market for new phones.
Get any of LG, Samsung or Motorola to sign up for this, and you're looking at more than 50% of the market for new cell phones.
But even with 45% of the market for new phones, it's still a massive incentive for the rest of the market. You could end up with a situation where new phones don't come with a charger, and you pay maybe 10 bucks for a new one if you need it. After all, with 45% of new cell phones needing this kind og charger, that's a huge opportunity for selling them separately.
I, for one, would like to see something similar happen to laptops as well, even though my 95W power brick is over sized for a netbook, it'd be nice not to have to pay a minor fortune to find the right one.
South Korea and China led the way on this (Score:4, Informative)
The Koreans carriers back in late 2005 and China a year later. It's about bloody time - the world needs less junk.
Re:I wish they had an international charger for al (Score:3, Informative)
The plugs are annoying, but you can literally get a set for under ten bucks. It's usually not that hard to plan ahead and carry the one or two you will need for the countries you're visiting. Practically all phone chargers run on 100-240V, anywhere fom 50-60 Hz (and probably then some!) and all you need is the plug.
Re:I hope Apple adopts this (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Great! (Score:4, Informative)
Re:much as I really support the idea of the standa (Score:2, Informative)
Durability (Score:5, Informative)
- Wikipedia [wikipedia.org]
Re:Huh? (Score:3, Informative)
The wall-wart contains the circuitry that converts 110vac/240vac to low voltage DC. Killing the wall wart means that same circuitry goes into the device, meaning that devices will now be larger by the size of the wall wart.
More sensible would be to simply make everything charge via USB, as USB is already a low-power DC source, and most low power (say 10W and under) devices can be made to work from it. Future versions of USB could even be made to allow higher current delivery, allowing higher draw devices to be connected.
Devices like modem routers though will always have a wall wart, unless you want them to be obscenely large and heavy. I'm happy for those devices to stay as-is however, as the vast majority of them are 12V 1A or below, so I just bought a dozen 12V 1A adapters from eBay once, and now I don't have to worry about losing them as they all work with each others' adapters.
Just remember, as long as the voltage is the same, the adapter can work. Most devices will have their input voltage stamped on them near the power jack, match it with an adapter and off you go. Just make sure that the adapter is capable of delivering as much or more current than necessary.
E.g., a modem router than says "Input 12v 500mA" will work just fine with my standard 12v 1A adapters.
Re:Great! (Score:3, Informative)
Even better: don't buy the travel adapter for your laptop, but after arriving just ask your host if he has a local power cord lying around (and steal that from him for your next trip :-). Alternatively go to the local electronics store (or dollar store) and buy one, they're two to five bucks.
Which would be the same if you would travel from the UK to let's say Germany or France, all with different wall outlets.
I live in Canada and over the years I've built up a small collection of European power cords. My laptops upgrade, but the power cords (mostly) stay the same.
Re: SIP? a single RFC? LOL! (Score:3, Informative)
Hahahahaha !
SIP a single RFC? Can you imagine the number of SIP related RFCs and associated drafts? SIP WAS simple, it is now a mess. Even if we restrict to RFC 3261, if you can asnwer the following questions you are already a MASTER in SIP:
- what is the difference between request URI and the "To" header? Are they redundant?
- what is the difference between the "Contact" header, the "P-Asserted-Identity" header and the "From" header?
- what is the loose routign mechanism and what is the relationship with the "Via" headers?
- what is the need for "from tags" and 'to tags".
If we go a bit further:
- Why is SIP/SIMPLE do we need to introduce an "etag" and why not resuing the callid ?
- etc.
We are a company that is based on SIP and very in favor of this protocol mostly form market reasons but one should not be blind: this protocol has its problems like any other. At the beginning, it was sooo "simple" that it could not even support "announced transfer" or line supervision which is a must for corporate telephony then the real people jumped in and added what it takes to make it usable and added complexity.
Even the big telco that are hated so much in this forum jumped in and created the IMS standards based on SIP (under the ETSI Umbrella = European ...). They took it to the next level of complexity but they NEEDED IT because they are the guys who enable you and me to call from A to B without even thinking about how this is done (since more that 100 years).
If you imagine one second that you can only read ONE RFC to start working on the real SIP world, you are VERY WRONG (see RFC 3581, RFC2327, RFC 3264, RFC 3550 + all the RFC dedicated to packetization, SIP/SIMPLE, MESSAGING, ....)
Now if you compare SIP with H.323, I agree that initially, one can see a lot of advantages.
- H323 has a stupid protocol layering
- slow dialog establishment, etc?
and although they have improved this, this is still not perfect but they have advandages as well:
- camera control and double video streams are a reality in H.323 world wher in SIP it is still on paper only and badly documented.
- screen and application sharing are a reality on H.323 world. They are non existant in SIP
- H.323 has defined a clean standard for NAT traversal where SIP has a set of "best practices" spread in various RFC (keepalive, rport, symetric RTP, etc.).
if you cannot read the ITU standards that is basically because:
- most of them need to be bought
- they have a strong culture of separating the function and the encoding, which renders them difficult to grasp for field hackers
- ITU protocols are often based on ASN.1 BER encoding and therefore are compact an binaries and cannot be test with a simple TELNET connection, which seems to trouble a lot of Internet gurus.
Emmanuel
http://www.ives.fr/ [www.ives.fr]
Re:I hope Apple adopts this (Score:3, Informative)
Get a Palm Pre with a touchstone today then. No need to wait for the future.
Re:Huh? (Score:4, Informative)
Devices like modem routers though will always have a wall wart, unless you want them to be obscenely large and heavy.
I don't see any real gain from the users point of view in having that bulk and weight in an extra box.
The real reason so much stuff uses wall warts is because it makes the regulatory compliance issues much easier/cheaper to deal with.
Re:Great! (Score:3, Informative)
You're lucky, not all power supplies have the same input socket.
There are three common ones afaict
the figure eight connector (2 pin 2.5A, seen on laptop PSUs and quite a bit of AV gear)
the "IEC" connector (3 pin 10A, seen on most desktop PCs, monitors, HDTVs etc)
the cloverleaf connector (3 pin 2.5A, seen on laptop PSUs)
In my experiance most stuff that has a detatchable mains lead uses one of the above three connectors
The figure eight and the IEC are very common and I'd think you'd have very little trouble borrowing a lead. Cloverleaf leads don't tend to be seen hanging around so much since they are mostly associated with newer laptops.
There is also a 16A variant of the IEC connector seen on some high end servers and workstations but not many people are likely to be traveling with those.