S Korea & China Mandate Common Chargers, Data Cables

mrbill writes "Seems that South Korea and China have mandated Common Cell Phone chargers and data cables. No proprietary chargers and data cables any more. Must use USB for charging etc. "

Or do the dual thing...

[__aaclcg7560]

My Dad got a new cell phone made by the same company that makes my cell phone that comes with a dual power interface. At home, he uses the pin connector to charge. At my place, he can use the flat connector that I use to charge my cell phone.

And what about laptops...

[Anonymous Coward]

...though I don't know is USB has the ompf for that, a standard would be nice. Especially if it worked on planes too.

Mostly good news for consumers

[dgm3574]

However, always beware the law of unintended consequences. It seems likely to me that the costs for this will be passed on to us, one way or another. The mobile manufacturers aren't just going to redesign and retool for free.

I would personally rather see more features, better battery life or enhanced reception than plug standardization.

Anyway, the USB port standard is pretty marginal. I've found them not to be all that durable, especially if you have to plug/unplug items frequently - like one will likely do with a phone charger.

All that said, I actually do have enough USB-chargeable devices that I'd like to see airlines and auto-makers start offering USB charging ports.

now let's get them in cars!

[jspectre]

now this is very nice news. would be even better if car companies put usb plugs right in a car. maybe one for data to play mp3's thru your radio, and a few just to charge various devices. who uses a cigarette lighter socket for cigarettes any more??? do we really need that huge socket plus a usb adapter?

Summary is wrong

[Tim C]

The summary says that phones "must use USB for charging". The fine article, however, says that "handsets sold there should be able to charge via USB".

There is a lot of difference between those two statements; the former makes absolutely no sense, as not every mobile phone user has a computer (or one with a USB port). The latter is a wonderful idea that frankly should be implemented as soon as humanly possible.

Re:Way to go!

[clonmult]

Have you looked at the Nokia range recently?

They're now on a smaller version of the power adapter, and use either USB or the pop-port connector for data connections.

Admiteddly, they're migrating away from the proprietary connections towards USB, and to 3.5mm headphone sockets.

Re:Way to go!

[Anonymous Coward]

As does Sanyo, well at least the 5 or so models I've owned.

Next on the list of things to standardize....
Portable music players and their dock ports. Each model or company can add above and beyond a standard if they should choose. The standard should include nothing less then power, basic song selection and playing buttons (FF, RWD, Shuffle, repeat, pause, Play, stop) and speaker/line level out. Please do not tell me this is a bad idea because companies make money and get some benefits from being proprietary. I am a user and buyer of electronics gear and I want what is good for me. An exclusive licensing deal between a company and a third party accessory maker is of NO advantage to me and never will be. Imagine of the headphone jack across multiple vendors was proprietary.

Not only positive

[Anonymous Coward]

Nokia gets the credit for using the same connector for all it's phones.

I got bitten by exactly that. I had a Nokia phone that ran out of power, but the charger was at home. So I borrowed a Nokia charger from someone else. I looked for a voltage rating on the phone, but couldn't find any, so in the end thought "ok, both phone and charger is Nokia, and the plugs fit, so let's give it a try".

Took half a year before the battery could hold power for more than a day. Charging a 15 volt Nokia phone (when I got home, I checked the voltage of my own charger) with a 3 volt Nokia charger is very bad for the battery.

Of course, the other way around might be even worse.

Re:amperage

[spikestabber]

A lot of motherboards power the USB through the +5VSB rail thus are unable to provide a lot of USB power over 500mA. Motherboards that come with 10 USB ports or more are powered by the main 5V rail, its rather trivial to find out you can get at least 2000mA out of one of them.

Re:suddenly

[djupedal]

'At least South Korea is democratic.'

Have you lived in either country? I've lived in both, and believe me, these days I'll take China (where I'm living now) over the peninsula any day of the week.

Oh, and since when is governmental mandatory hardware configuration democratic..?

Re:But the FREE MARKET!

[mjh]

So, the government mandates that all chargers must be USB. Which means that no one, not even apple, [apple.com] can create a new innovative power connection for charging things. If you believe that USB chargers are the best solution that anyone could ever come up with, then this is a good deal. But if you think that, I think you underestimate human creativity. The people under this rule will be precluded from freely being able to purchase new technology. And that's good, how?

The free market DOES produce the best results for the consumer. To quote one of my favorite bloggers:

Economics is a science. Willful ignorance or emotional rejection of the well-known precepts of this science is at least as bad as a fundamentalist Christian's willful ignorance of evolution science... In fact, economic ignorance is much worse, since most people can come to perfectly valid conclusions about most public policy issues with a flawed knowledge of the origin of the species but no one can with a flawed understanding of economics.
- Warren Meyer [coyoteblog.com]

Re:Mandate

[trewornan]

Slashdot is not a typical cross section of the general public - most people are unlikely to buy a data cable or flasher for their mobile phone.

Re:Can we get them to work on laptops, next?

[Anonymous Coward]

Not really practical. Different laptops have different power consumption requirements. My Thinkpad only needs a 72W brick while my old "desktop replacement" Compaq with a DTR Athlon64 and large LCD needed a 140W power brick.

Those of us with smaller, more efficent laptops shouldn't be burdened to carry around a power brick that is designed to handle the most power wasting of laptops.

Re:Motorola is already doing it

[Count_Froggy]

Two caveats: You cannot charge a RAZR from a USB port on a laptop without buying Motorola's 'Mobile tools'. The port on my ACER laptop will not supply power without an active driver in WinXP - and Motorola doesn't include drivers with the phone (or allow them to be downloaded later). Another reason to not buy another Motorola product. Crippled USB port. Would you buy a usb-equipped music player if you had to pay extra to get the usb port to work???

Who cares? Anyone with more than one device!

[Kelson]

Buy a phone, it comes with a charger, you charge it. Who cares if your neighbor has a different charger??

When my wife and I travel, we have to carry the following chargers:

1 for my phone
1 for her phone
1 for the laptop
1 for the PDA
1 for the camera

Sure, it means we can recharge everything at once if we have to. But it also means we have to carry 5 items that do the same thing. That's wasted clutter.

Now, if each device used the same connectors and voltage, we could cut that down to one charger. That would be very convenient.

I'm not saying government mandate is the way to go. I'm just pointing out that there's a valid reason people might want those common chargers.

On another note, I think you're getting North Korea and South Korea mixed up.