This past December I lost the charger to my cell phone one Friday night (don't ask), and my phone's battery died the following afternoon. Because my phone uses a charger that's rare this side of the Atlantic, I was stuck with an expensive plastic paperweight until a new charger could arrive from Nokia about a week later. Somewhere out there, the cell phone gods must have heard the proficient, curse-laden rants that flowed from me during that week. 17 companies have agreed to adopt micro USB as a standard charger format.
The big savings for manufacturers and buyers will come in the sheer number of chargers that will no longer have to be bundled with handsets: The use of a standard format is predicted to result in a 50 percent reduction in the number of chargers that have to be produced and sold each year. That's significant.
The list of companies immediately signing on to the initiative reads like a who's who in the GSM cell phone space -- LG, Nokia, Samsung, Sony Ericsson, AT&T, T-Mobile, Motorola -- but lacks a few key players, notably Apple, which is holding on to the legacy iPod connector with a veritable death grip. RIM and Palm are also both missing from the initial list of supporters.
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