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EDN Europe's Editor Graham Prophet posts a selection of comments and insights prompted by the many items of industry news and rumour that cross the editorial desk or are gathered on his frequent travels to interviews, press conferences and events around Europe - and further afield - and somehow never find their way to the magazine or the web site, recovering some of the information otherwise lost in the noise level...

Wednesday, February 18, 2009

Better late than never

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I’ve written almost exactly this comment before, but never mind, it’s worth saying again. At the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, an initiative (A new one? A previous one re-branded? – It’s hard to tell) has been announced by the GSMA and 17** mobile operators and manufacturers, to implement a universal charger for mobile phones.

Well, put out the flags.

Let me quote from the statement; the grouping is “committed to implementing a cross-industry standard for a universal charger for new mobile phones. The aim of the initiative, led by the GSMA, is to ensure that the mobile industry adopts a common format for mobile phone charger connections and energy-efficient chargers resulting in an estimated 50% reduction in standby energy consumption, the potential elimination of up to 51,000 tonnes of duplicate chargers and the enhancement of the customer experience by simplifying the charging of mobile phones.
“The group has set an ambitious target that by 2012 a universal charging solution (UCS) will be widely available in the market worldwide and will use Micro-USB as the common universal charging interface. The group agreed that by the 1st January 2012, the majority of all new mobile phone models available will support a universal charging connector and the majority of chargers shipped will meet.......high efficiency target……UCS chargers will also include a 4-star or higher efficiency rating, which is up to three times more energy-efficient than an unrated charger.”

Well done, guys. What took you so long? The need – and the opportunity – has been glaringly obvious for, literally, years. And it’s not as if it’s going to be all that difficult; you need to define a common physical connector to start with. In principle, you need to either agree that all compliant products will use a single voltage over that connector: or, you need to write an auto-negotiating protocol to deliver a variable charging voltage. Either would be perfectly viable. But wait! USB has done most of the work for you. Any half-way competent engineer who works with battery-powered hand-helds should be able to wrap the job up in a morning.

Part of the announcement’s assertion is that there will be great savings to the environment by not requiring the manufacture, purchase and eventual disposal of vast numbers of (inefficient) after-market chargers. So there might; but only, members of the consortium, if you package with the phone a charger of sufficient quality to last more than a few months. If the OEM chargers supplied continue to be built to the cheapest possible price, and cause the customer to turn within a few months to the unbranded market for replacements, not much will be gained.

**The initial group of companies who have joined the GSMA’s UCS initiative include 3 Group, AT&T, KTF, LG, mobilkom austria, Motorola, Nokia, Orange, Qualcomm, Samsung, Sony Ericsson, Telecom Italia, Telefónica, Telenor, Telstra, T-Mobile and Vodafone.

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