Cell Phone
Micro-USB Mobile Phone Charging Standard Announced
Relief from the tangled mess that is the cell phone charger market today is finally in sight
Last week a group of power players in the mobile phone manufacturing industry gathered to discuss the future of phone charging and data exchange. The companies reached an agreement to put an end to the mess of incompatible proprietary power connectors that has plagued the cell phone industry for years. The companies agreed to adopt a new USB standard called Micro-USB: a shrunk-down portable version of the USB 2.0 standard.
Micro-USB is smaller and thinner than Mini-USB which many cell phones currently support. The standard was develop early this year and introduced by the USB Implementers Forum (USB-IF), the group responsible for new USB standards.
To give an idea of the average specs of a Micro-USB connection, Hirose, a major manufacture provides the following the following information on their ZX series Micro-USB design:
Durability of 10, 000 cycles (mating/un-mating), extraction force of 8N (initial and after cycling), contact resistance of 30m Ohms (initial, 10m Ohms rise max. after cycling) is only an example of the ZX connector performance levels.
The biggest winner in this long coming development is the consumer, who will no longer have to worry about proprietary connectors and will be free to use old connectors or their friends connectors.
