Standardized cell phone chargers!
February 18th, 2009After a nearly 30 year wait, Micro USB it is!
Yesterday at the GSMA Mobile World Congress conference in Barcelona, 17 cell phone manufacturers have finally agreed to a universal cell phone charger standard, Micro USB.
The goal is to have most new handsets supporting the micro USB format by January 1, 2012. One of the few handsets utilizing the new connector is the BlackBerry Storm, along with a few other high-end phones. The new chargers are supposedly designed to use half as much power when in standby mode.
The big savings for manufacturers and buyers will come in the sheer number of chargers that will no longer have to be bundled with handsets: The use of a standard format is predicted to result in a 50 percent reduction in the number of chargers that have to be produced and sold each year. That’s significant.
The main companies that signed on to the standardization are:
LG, Nokia, Samsung, Sony Ericsson, AT&T, T-Mobile and Motorola. RIM isn’t on the list becasue the have already started implementing the new connector, as mentioned above.
Let’s hope that the transition goes smoothly and we can go from this:
To this:
