Phone chargers to be harmonised

Europe Editor Seán Whelan looks at the decision to introduce a single mobile phone charger type from next year.


EU Harmonisation gets a petty bad press, but this time the Eurocrats may have hit paydirt.

Under pressure from the European Commission, ten of the world's biggest mobile phone makers - including Nokia, Apple and Motorola - have agreed to introduce a common mobile phone charger.

This should mean fewer of those annoying occasions when you run short of power, and nobody has a charger that fits your phone.

Or having to buy a new charger for the office when you get a new mobile, because the manufacturer has changed the charger type.

Or having to throw away your perfectly good charger when your old phone dies and you get a new one (or when you upgrade) -thus being more environmentally friendly, as well as just plain sensible.

The EC is claiming credit for inducing this outbreak of common sense by threatening the phone makers with harmonisation legislation.

So the makers - Apple, LG, Motorola, NEC, Nokia, Qualcomm, Research in Motion (aka Blackberry), Samsung, Sony Ericsson and Texas Instruments - have come up with their own common standard for chargers.

Under a Memorandum of Understanding, the ten manufacturers will use the micro-USB style charger for all their data enabled phones from next year onwards.

As almost all phones from these companies are expected to be data-enabled from 2010 on, this should see the vast majority phones being sold with the same type of charger.

Of course there is a get out clause - if future charging technologies are better, the memorandum can be easily changed to allow for their introduction.

But hopefully the principle of interchangeable chargers will stay.

The agreement only covers the territory of the EU, but as the leading marketplace for dataphones, the EU hopes the agreement will spread around the world, and become a new global standard.

Sean Whelan