Things haven’t improved much at all since Douglas Adams wrote his rant about little dongly things. USB was supposed to solve this, but somehow I still have a lot of chargers in the house. Each of the following charges one or more of the battery-powered mobile devices in my household and has a different plug from all the others:
- Nokia, US plug
- Nokia, Europlug
- Nintendo DS
- Motorola Xoom
- proprietary USB plug for iPod
- Dell laptop
- Acer netbook
- Electrical shaver
- Lumix camera
- AA battery charger for my GPS
Notice how nothing I own charges from a standard USB plug, and AA batteries have almost entirely disappeared. It’s a pretty sad state of affairs. To be truly mobile, I regularly load my luggage with at least half a dozen wires, plus AC converters.
In my utopian future, I don’t want a flying car or a jetpack. I want more standards.