You know when you drop round a friend’s house, maybe your phone rings or you want to make a call. NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO, you’re low on power and the low battery light is flashing. So you ask your friend if you could use their charger…agghhhh, it’s the wrong fitting for your mobile; which means you’re not going anywhere if your battery’s dead? Yep we’ve all been there.
With every phone manufacturer coming up with their own design, it’s lead to all sorts of incompatibility problems as well as a huge amount of wasted resources. The good news is that the main handset manufacturers came to an agreement awhile back for a single charger using the Micro-USB connector fitting. So what does this mean, well you’ll no longer have to sort through drawers full of old and obsolete chargers to fit your phone. But the obvious benefits are environmental. With a standardized fitting, it’ll mean that we produce fewer chargers, because we can share chargers more readily, which in turn means less resources will be dug up.
So thank you, Apple, Nokia, Qualcomm, RIM, LG, Sony Ericsson, Motorola, and Samsung are all on board in Europe however, the US has yet to come on board with the new standard. The first common chargers and mobile phones compatible with the new standards to reach the European market in the first months of 2011.
