China charges ahead on chargers

THE PEOPLE'S Republic of China said it will begin enforcing a universal standard of cell phone charger in the next month. As the world+dog knows, the IT superpower, and of course the ROC called Taiwan are responsible for a staggering percentage of overall IT production capacity. In 2004, for example, they shipped over one third of all mobile phones in the world, with that figure growing by 12 per cent in the next year.

While some manufacturers might grumble that the new policy will force them to make changes to their phone designs, the Ministry of Information Industry has taken the step to reduce the number of phone chargers that have to be thrown away every year. With nearly 100 million mobile phones being replaced in China every year, this potentially represents a big reduction in e-waste, and is definitely a good thing.

I wrote recently about the frustration that, as it turned out, many have felt. After buying the latest and greatest mobile, only to discover in amongst all the overblown two cameras, Blackberry functionality, WLAN, and Bluetooth functionality that Nokia had reduced the size of its charger by around one one-millionth of an centimetre. Just enough to mean that all the old chargers I had stockpiled were useless. I had not bought my phone because it had the most features, but rather because it was a Nokia, and in my experience, just about everyone has one under the bed.

This move by China is a victory for common snese, and not before time. One wonders what benefit mobile phone manufacturers have derived from different charger standards in the past, besides increased after market sales.

Many local Chinese companies such as Lenovo and Konka already have compliant mobile phones, while Motorola and Sony-Ericsson already have some phones in their range that are compliant with the USB standard. Other manufactures have complained, however, that phone costs will rise as they will no longer be able to ship the same model of phone to all countries. Given the universal nature of USB, however, you'd expect that in the long-term, people will benefit from this move. µ