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."
Finally (Score:1, Interesting)
If Apple would now implement a micro-USB port onto the iPhone instead of that dock connector.
And preferably something easy to take out. The end of the cable that came with my iPhone is rather small and hard to pull compared to the one that came with my 2nd gen. Nano.
Re:Huh? (Score:5, Interesting)
Now all we need is a universal standard of (in the words of Douglas Adams) 'little dongly things' for everything else:
http://www.douglasadams.com/dna/980707-03-a.html [douglasadams.com]
'The little dongly things I am concerned with (and they are by no means the only species of little dongly things with which the micro-electronics world is infested) are the external power adaptors which laptops and palmtops and external drives and cassette recorders and telephone answering machines and powered speakers and other incredibly necessary gizmos need to step down the mains AC supply from either 120 volts or 240 volts to 6 volts DC. Or 4.5 volts DC. Or 9 volts DC. Or 12 volts DC. At 500 milliamps. Or 300 milliamps. Or 1200 milliamps. They have positive tips and negative sleeves on their plugs, unless they are the type that has negative tips and positive sleeves. By the time you multiply all these different variables together you end up with a fairly major industry which exists, so far as I can tell, to fill my cupboards with little dongly things none of which I can ever positively identify without playing gizmo pelmanism. The usual method of finding a little dongly thing that actually matches a gizmo I want to use is to go and buy another one, at a price that can physically drive the air from your body...It's hard to imagine that some of the mightiest brains on the planet, fuelled by some of the finest pizza that money can buy, haven't at some point thought 'Wouldn't it be easier if we all just standardised on one type of DC power supply?'...I strongly suspect that if you stuck a hardware engineer in a locked room for a couple of days and taunted him with the smell of pepperoni, he'd probably be able to think of a way of making whatever gizmo (maybe even the new gizmo Pro, which I've heard such good things about) it is he's designing, work to a standard DC low-power supply.'
Re:Finally (Score:4, Interesting)
What twisted your mind into thinking, a non-elected group, that is not even remotely connected to the constitutions of the countries in it, and is none of the 3 pillars of a government, would have any jurisdiction in those countries?
That would be totalitarian dictatorship. Plain and simple.
Additionally, where would you go, if that totalitarian global, all-encompassing dictatorship, would happen to not like your views and actions?? There would be not other country to flee to. The concept of asylum would cease to exist.
And you just talked about it, like it were something normal...
I fear for this world...
Re:Whew! (Score:3, Interesting)
The ITU is a pretty decent organization going back to 1865 with establishment of international standards for telegraphy.
One proposal was to put them in charge of the root name servers. It wouldn't be the worst thing that could happen.
Re:ITU, the folk who should run the WWW. (Score:5, Interesting)
Hell, no! ITU has a known history of
a) writing unreadable standards (such as G.711, the a-law, mu-law telephony codec)
b) retarded protocols (H.323, where messages are formatted according to an hierarchy defined in 3+ different standards, and call initiation sequences have so many alternatives that it is common to have two certified H.323 endpoints refuse to talk to each other. Implementing H.323 involves thousands of lines of code. While SIP (a non-ITU protocol) uses text headers similar to email and http, can be understood from a single RFC and can be correctly implemented in a few hundred lines.)
c) favoring patented cash troll codecs such as G.729 instead of similar patent-free ones. (Meanwhile, a lot of international phone traffic is performed in roughly-uncompressed G.711, using 10x the bandwidth because the licensing fees of G.729 are outrageous)
That's ITU for you, and these people should be forbidden from publishing any standard whatsoever.
Re:Micro-USB? (Score:3, Interesting)
If you design a phone to be charged at 5V@2,000mA, and plug it into an adapter or USB port which can only provide 5V@500mA, your adapter (or USB port) will soon catch fire, or burn out.
The device has no way to know what current the power supply can provide, and only high-end power supplies have any form of current regulation/overload protection built-in.