March 24th, 2008
Will You Standardize the @#$%! Chargers Please
Upon prepping my laptop travel case for an upcoming trip, I discovered to my horror that the chargers to my bluetooth headset and my Blackberry were missing. I had apparently left it in my room at the Holiday Inn in Rhode Island last week, and when I called them, they couldn’t find it.
Okay, no big deal, right? Just waltz into any wireless phone store and pick one up. 20 bucks, 3rd party accessory purchase, ka-ching, problem solved. Right? WRONG.
Sure, the Blackberry and many other devices use the same micro-USB charger connector, so it wasn’t a tragedy to pull one of my old Motorola Razr chargers out and get my cell back in business. But then I looked at my Aliph Jawbone — which is probably the best Bluetooth headset in the biz right now — and remembered that it uses a non-standard, proprietary connector. AT&T Wireless, my cellular provider, doesn’t even sell the replacement charger in stores. You need to order it from the Aliph web site.
Look, the whole charger thing is out of control. How many of these damn things do we need to bring with us when we go on trips? Cell Charger, Headset Charger, Camera Battery Charger, iPod charger, Laptop Charger, portable game device Charger. Portable GPS Charger. Chargers, Chargers, Chargers, Chargers. All these freaking chargers.
I’m not going to single out Aliph and the Jawbone on the whole non-standard charger thing. Plenty of other devices are equal offenders. It’s truly ridiculous and the entire situation has become close to untenable. There has to be a way to get the whole portable consumer device industry in line. Micro-USB seems to be a pretty darn good standard. So can we stick with it, pretty please?
Stop the charger insanity!
Jason Perlow is a technologist with over two decades of experience integrating large heterogeneous multi-vendor computing environments in Fortune 500 companies. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
| 03/24/08
