Standardized Phone Chargers for Japan
Japan's telecoms ministry has announced that it plans to mandate standardised connections for mobile phone chargers in the future. The plans are to force all 4G handsets, due around 2010 to use a single connector for charging the handset so that users can swap chargers at whim.
At the moment, the specifications used for cell phone chargers by DoCoMo, KDDI and Vodafone differ and their chargers are incompatible. While in Europe, Nokia are so dominant that you can be fairly sure that someone in an office will have a spare Nokia charger in an emergency, the Japanese handset market is far more fragmented between the manufacturers."
Posted to the site on 13th July 2006