Standard Power Chargers Would Be Nice

Rus­sell Beatie has a fas­ci­nat­ing pic­ture show­ing his wide array of devices recharg­ing, which trig­gered in me some­thing that has been dis­turb­ing me for a long time: why is it that every mobile device out there seems to have a dif­fer­ent power plug?

There is no com­pet­i­tive advan­tage in offer­ing a dif­fer­ent charger and yet it seems that every ven­dor has come up with a dif­fer­ent approach when it comes to the charg­ing port. As a result, scores of users have to pack mul­ti­ple charg­ers when they travel. Just off the top of my head, a typ­i­cal user would gen­er­ally pack dif­fer­ent charg­ers for each of the fol­low­ing devices: lap­top, mobile phone, cam­era, mp3 player, and PDA. Granted, a way to solve the prob­lem is to aggre­gate devices (for exam­ple, as I do with the Treo, use a smart device that includes many of those func­tions) so you have to carry fewer charg­ers but ulti­mately, there’s always more than one and few peo­ple around with a charger that is compatible.

There is, how­ever, a com­pet­i­tive advan­tage for ven­dors in estab­lish­ing a stan­dard. That advan­tage goes to the age old issue of price. If two play­ers agreed to a sim­i­lar set of power charg­ers, they could not force their ven­dor (charg­ers are gen­er­ally sub­con­tracted) to build them and then work on cre­at­ing com­peti­ti­tion between those ven­dors, hence putting pres­sure on prices. Inno­va­tion could then start appear­ing in that mar­ket as the ven­dors would be forced to look at fea­tures they could use to remain com­pet­i­tive. For exam­ple, one could see com­pa­nies devel­op­ing charg­ers that are smaller, recharge bat­ter­ies faster, or con­sume less energy when con­vert­ing power. In the future, one could even envi­sion a world where “power charger not included” would become more of a de-facto rule from elec­tron­ics vendors.

End users would, of course, ben­e­fit from this since they would be able to go any­where and find a charger that is com­pat­i­ble with their devices. One could go to a con­fer­ence, or visit friends, or go to a hotel and eas­ily find a way to recharge. Fur­ther­more, if one lost or for­got their charger some­where, they would be able to eas­ily replace the miss­ing charger cheaply.

All and all, the cur­rent state of affairs when it comes to the power issue is sad and I wish the elec­tron­ics indus­try would agree on com­ing up with a com­mon stan­dard and set of approaches when it comes to power, which would ben­e­fit everyone.