Universal phone charger

Rudolph Muller

Rudolph Muller is the editor at MyBroadband and covers telecoms and broadband news. Rudolph comes from an academic background, but left the University of...

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Consumers tired of having a drawer-full of old, worthless chargers that can’t be used to power up your new cellphone can take heart in a decision by the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) on a standard for all future phone charges. The decision by the ITU will put an end to proprietary mobile phone chargers and allow consumers to use a single charger for all brands of phones.

For consumers this means that they will not need to buy a new charger each time they change cellphones and they will be able to share a single charger between multiple users. For cellphone makers it will reduce the need to ship a new charger with each phone they produce, significantly reducing the number of chargers in production.

In future – at least within the next couple of years – mobile phone users will have to buy a universal charger separately from their mobile phone, but that charger will be compatible with future phones they may buy.

The move to a universal charger comes just two weeks before the Climate Change Talks to be held in Barcelona in early November and cements a decision first made at the Mobile World Congress in February. At the time all major manufacturers, excluding Apple, agreed to work towards a universal cellphone charger. Apple subsequently joined a European-specific initiative to promote universal chargers by 2010.

The ITU says that the new Universal Charging Solution – UCS – is expected to reduce standby energy consumption by 50% and “eliminate 51 000 tonnes of redundant chargers, and a subsequent reduction of 13.6 million tonnes in greenhouse gas emissions each year”.

The new charger format will use the MicroUSB input jack, a connection already built into many newer cellphones. To date most of the MicroUSB ports built into mobile phones have have been used to provide users with the ability to transfer data from their PC to their phone. That same format jack will now be used to recharge the phone.

When the grouping of mobile makers at the Mobile World Congress in February first agreed to work towards a universal charging system they said the objective was to achieve this by 2012. Now, however, the reality of a universal charger appears to be much closer than expected. Most mobile makers are already piloting universal chargers in their European markets and it seems certain that they will start to become more commonplace by the end of 2010.

Universal phone charger – discussion