And One Charger To Rule Them All

July 02, 2009

Amid all the downer news and rain lately, I spotted this bright tidbit on the New York Times site: the European Union just decided to introduce standard cell phone chargers.

In the future, micro-USB connectors are going to be it, no matter what brand cell phone Europeans buy. The European Commission came to the agreement voluntarily and secured pledges of support from ten major international retailers that sell their phones in the EU.

The New York Times points out that this could mean retailers will eventually sell chargers separately from phones to further reduce waste. The States might be a holdout on the metric system, but I imagine that those influential retailer pledges will eventually translate into a standard on this side of the pond. Before the commission made a decision, my blogosphere cousins at TreeHugger reported that voltage and battery variations remain challenges to standard-makers. Now that the standard EU chargers are scheduled to go into effect next year, perhaps making the micro-USB truly universal can't be far off.

Photo: Kiss superfluous chargers goodbye. Credit: Asim Bharwani.

Comments

[krobinson]

Hmmm, I wonder what this means for companies like GreenPlug.

[Alyssa Danigelis]

I was thinking the same thing about GreenPlug, but think that their smart system will still work no matter what plug gets adopted. It's more about the communication and the signal for the device to stop drawing power.