I was thinking it’s something people would eventually ask for voluntarily and was thinking of regulation as a means to speed it up. It’s just like the difference between cars in the UK and cars elsewhere.
Why do people go on the left side of the road? Because of tradition - people always did that.
This is similar to how the FAA certifies airplanes and avionics. The process the FAA uses goes something like this:
So all this work gets put into making government standards, but at the end of the day the government certification people apply their own interpretation to that standard.
Then you do that. Leave the rest of us alone. If no firm sees a profit in it and you think there is one, gather capital and start innovating. If there isn’t a profit to be had, there is no reason for the investment to be undertaken.
If there were one universally appealing design for power adapters, we would already have it. Say I have two phones, a top of the line pda phone with high definition video output, and a $30 nokia I use at work. I want a combination power adapter/hdmi cable for my pda phone. Under this regulation, either I can’t get one (meaning I have to purchase three cables total) or I must buy two (meaning I have to pay extra for a cable that the nokia can’t use). Some savings! To add insult to injury, the phones and adapters are now more expensive to account for the cost of compliance with the regulation that is there for “my” benefit AND I’m paying some bureaucrat to impose those costs on the manufacturer! Not to mention, if I want to purchase a phone that can only be charged with a proprietary connector to a twelve volt car battery that is being charged by a hamster in a wheel turning a small generator, that is my right.
By the way, several companies are producing universal chargers and small, very inexpensive adapters to connect their chargers to any phone. Market 1, government 0!
I have an HTC phone that has just one connector: mini-usb. It does the sync and the charge. At this point, this is probably a ‘standard’, since the Jabra Bluetooth Wireless stereo headphones I bought also has a single mini-usb port that charges and serves as a wired connection to a PC for audio over cable. I bought both of these without considering the connector at all. The wall-charger that came with my phone and the one that came with my BT headphones are completely interchangeable, as are the data-cables provided by each device. Additionally, each device is charged from either the chargers, or the USB port of a PC.
Despite the neatness of the above port, who says that the mini-USB port would be the standard chosen by a government, and who says that all governments would chose the same standard?
Suppose the mini-USB port was chosen. What happens as the serial data connections to PC’s start to be improved? Already e-SATA could possibly be the next main serial data connection, but maybe it will be something else entirely. Whatever it is, I bet it won’t be compatible with current USB connectors. So for the multi-year transition period away from USB to whatever, will we have phones that need to retain the old USB connector for charger purposes due to govt mandates or regulations, and have the new connector for data-sync purposes?
Of course, we will probably have many more years of phones that don’t do data-sync at all. Since there is already a range of ‘standard’ chargers you can get at any electronics store, it would make sense that these phones have a port that can use those types of chargers.
I don’t see any value in govt stepping in here. At all. Not even maybe.