Once again, I ask: someone please let me know if I'm missing some huge advancement in consumer power technology. But instead of big computer power supplies, I'm talking today about small wall-wart (I hate those words) consumer electronic chargers.
I'm really disappointed with the lack of leadership in this space. Every piece of chargable electronics I own has a separate charging voltage, power requirement, and plug. None of it is compatible, and it's all a giant mess.
Look, electronics vendors—I understand that the low price of power supply production makes this a non-issue to you, but it's a huge issue to me as I have to keep (and when traveling, pack) separate chargers for every handheld electronic gewgaw I own, and those things are often the largest and heaviest piece of equipment in the set.
I want to spent a non-insubstantial amount of money on a good charger with high-quality cabling and a connection mechanism that was actually thought through. Get it together and standardize this, dammit.
P.S. This was all started when I noticed that some cellphone manufacturers were settling on micro-USB as a common charging mechanism. This is a good start—but I own more than just a cell phone, and it'll be a while until I see the fruits of this. High-fives all around to cell makers, angry scowls to the rest of you jokers.
P.P.S. Points to whoever can identify the electronics to which the pictured cord was connected.
I think the biggest shortcoming with wall wart technology is the fact that they are "tuned" to a particular load, meaning that if you use a 1A supply for something that's only drawing 20mA, it's hugely inefficient. The design community has gotten very good at getting efficiencies for power supplies into the 90's of percentiles, but only for the "anticipated load."
The result is that whenever you aren't using a device but its wall wart is still plugged in, the fucker is burning through energy just heating itself because it doesn't have a good mechanism for dealing with ~0 load.
Not to toot my own ass horn... but we've been working on power supplies for some of our unattended gear that have a feedback mechanism for looking at trends in load and switching front ends dynamically for different load scenarios. So when the device is idle and not using much power, we kick in a low power, high-efficiency supply running at about 95%, then when the device suddenly needs to do something power-intensive (a burst transmission, e.g.), we flip over to the bigger supply and give it the beans.
The trick is to do this without power transients when you suddenly request a lot of power from a supply that is currently configured to deliver microamps. But it can be done.
However, I think this sort of thing isn't really feasible for general market wall warts, since we take frequent advantage of a priori knowledge of the behavior of the load. If you don't know what you're plugged into, this problem gets exponentially harder.
Why does your comment engine allow me to use <i> tags (see a priori, above), but not <s> tags (see ass, above)? Turned what would have been a lame joke into something vaguely uncomfortable. :)
It's pretty rare for chargeable electronics to require continuous power when juicing up. Throw some simple logic into the power supply to meter the power draw every minute or so and if it's not in the effeciency range of the charger, turn the power off for a few milliseconds while switching transformers.
This won't work for a commodity came-in-the-box-with-my-phone charger, but is easily justifiable in a general-pupose electronics charger.
I wouldn't call an ass horn "vaguely" uncomfortable.
I think you need an iGo. Also, for things that arent iGo friendly, I believe I saw something similar at radio shack that had, what looked to be, a potientiometer with marking on it for different charging levels. I would assume there is a switch to choose the power levels, and the potentiometer for amperage. I just glanced at the thing a few months back, so the details are sketchy.
The iGo is a step in the right direction. The tips are particularly clever in that they appear to select the correct voltage from the multi-line feed.
Ultimately, I'd love to avoid the tips, too—in an ideal world, some putz would have written a spec for tying voltages and power requirements directly to a plug shape.
Good find, though. This may solve some of my power problems yet.