Good news on phone chargers.

[Norm]

I've done similar to Piemaster, choosing products which take mini or micro USB (I'm not too precious about which) chargers over anything which is proprietary.

I fecking hate crApple (I like that! Thanks, MrP) for changing their charger for absolutely no reason other than monetising (shite Americanism used ironically) their customers. The original and revised chargers have no technical reasons for the differences, they just switched a few wires to force people to buy new hardware.

 

[Globalti]

Now how about persuading the rest of the world to adopt British square pin electric wall sockets?

 

[pshore]

Am I the only person who has 50,000 old chargers I daren't throw away in I need one of them? When I buy something with a charger I often think I'll label it in some way but never do (that they are all black doesn't help) Even if I find one that fits a device I daren't use it in case some voltage discrepancy might blow the lot up

You are not the only one. I have a hold-all full of old cables, connectors and power adapters in the loft. External PSU's have a very poor lifetime typically 1-3 years running in my experience so don't leave them turned on.

It is possible to swap simple constant-power adapters from one device to another with caveats (see below) but the chargers often have some intelligence circuitry to charge lithium batteries correctly without blowing them up.


For simple PSUs eg (cd player, music keyboard, router):

The donor PSU needs to match voltage of the old one - I think of this as how much electricity is being pushed into your device and if you force too much in it will blow up. You can try going slightly above or below as some products have tolerances but it is risky.

The donor PSU also needs to be able to deliver enough milliamps. I think of this as how much power the device consumes from the PSU. If it cannot get enough it will not be powered correctly. I personally wouldn't bugger about with a device needing 1 amp (1000ma) or more but I don't recall ever seeing an external PSU needing that much power.

Don't forget to observe polarity - eg on a round connector, the centre part can be negative or positive.

One of those univeral power supplies is very useful to have when a PSU dies.

 

[Jezston]

I met a Finnish girl in a hostel in New York who had a phone multi-charger - a single plug with about every conceivable phone power attachment sprouting from it. Myself and the other tourists, and the hostels owners, were in absolute awe of this device.

Fortuntately my current and previous 2 phones have been micro usb.

 

[Over The Hill]

I met a Finnish girl in a hostel in New York who had a phone multi-charger - a single plug with about every conceivable phone power attachment sprouting from it. Myself and the other tourists, and the hostels owners, were in absolute awe of this device.

Fortuntately my current and previous 2 phones have been micro usb.

Did she let you plug your device in her socket?

 

[Over The Hill]

I would just be happy with plugs that worked both ways round, I never seem to have the thing round the right way and you never know if it is not quite lined up or if it is the wrong way round.

 

[Dan B]

wish I knew the difference !

http://static.blackberryrocks.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/mini-micro-usb-connector.jpg


Mini-usb on the left, micro-usb in the right. Micro-usb really isn't so much smaller to be worth the name "micro", but it is thinner, which is attractive for some gadgets that aren't very thick