Aside from the convenience of being able to borrow another charger from someone, why is the proposed standard a good thing for me?
What am I missing?
Is it simply that I would be able to plug my phone into anyone's charger?
Cos if it is, I've got to say that between the USB shaped charger cable I have at home, and the 3rd party retractable cable that goes out in the car and to work, it's not a big issue. I just need a USB port.

There's millions of iThings. That's millions of needless iAdapters.

To me personally, it's several friends who ironically complain that I don't have the "right" charger when their phone runs out. Most people don't carry wires around with them.

New dock connector (if it happens) to mini USB adapter. *shrug*

Mark

Correct me if I'm wrong but everything I've read points merely to a physical redesign. I haven't seen anything saying that the new connector will be electrically incompatible with the old one.

If the port drivers in iOS retain some 30-pin compatibility and the new connector simply drops some unnecessary cruft (such as the YPbPr pins), it should be fairly simple to manufacture a dock adaptor tbh.

Oh, look.

Mark

That looks stupid. That adapter doesn't seem to fit with Apple's design philosohy. If they did a micro USB port, THAT would be in an adapter.

I know, Paul.
It's all just speculation until it's not, at which point we'll all know exactly what's going on.

Mark

No, I think you misread the article.

The article is about the port in the phone being compatible with micro USB. The picture is what someone has come up with as a theoretical adapter that could be created to convert from the new connection to the old one ("imagined by Italian blog Mela").

The idea is, that because it is a standard, the manufacturers don't need to waste resources including a power adapter and cable with every device.

At the moment, most still include the power adapter with each device, but in theory, if you already have an power adapter, you can save a couple of quid on each device (and the resources used to make the adapter) and just buy a new adapter for a couple of quid, when the old one dies.

In my case, I use a powered USB Hub to charge and I need one cable for Samsung, htc and LG phones, only the iPhone needs a different cable.

They probably are still going to though. You can't guarantee that the person buying the phone has one already can you? They might not have had a mobile before. They might have sold their old phone on and included their previous charger in with that. Manufacturers will err on the side of caution and include one anyway, because it's better than having a p!ssed off customer. It's the 'batteries not included' argument. That used to p!ss customers off to the point where they got fed up and now pretty much all battery powered items do have a set of batteries included, because not having them made people not buy the product in protest.

It will still mean you can use any charger that happens to be around which is of itself a great benefit and presumably will reduce the cost as you'll get massive economies of scale on them but I can't actually see that the number of chargers being made/shipped will significantly decrease, at least in the short term.

Proprietary connectors/chargers only benefit one group and it isnt the consumer.

I can appreciate the logic behind a 'one connector to rule them all' approach.
But it's just not a huge hassle, for me, at the moment.
Are these connectors are more than just a form-factor, but the supplies are the same too?
Or are the phones quite adaptive?

True, but that's a separate argument to whether you provide a charger or not.

You can charge any phone off any charger. As I said before, it's not just phones either. A lot of gadgets use them, and a lot of cheap Chinese tat doesn't come with an adaptor now.

I love the fact that my Sammy charger covers loads of stuff, Kindle and new phone included