Japan to Unite Cell Phone Charger Plugs

Nifty news out of Tokyo: By 2010 service providers and cell phone makers will finally release a single standard for charger plugs for phones sold in the country of Japan.

I don't know about you, but despite my best efforts at labeling adapters with a white china marker, keeping phones in plastic bags along with their chargers and other peripherals, and doing everything else in my power to make sure chargers are kept track of, I still manage to lose a good number of them and end up with a baffling collection of unlabeled "mystery" A/C adapters.

This isn't rocket science, folks: Why can't we get this going in the States, too? Cell phones use an amount of power that falls in a very narrow range of wattage, and any charger ought to be able to supply that kind of power for any phone. (Many have posited that the answer should be USB, which would not only provide a single standard for charging but one for data connections, too.)

The problem is trickier for laptops, where power consumption varies widely based on the size of the machine. Here it might make sense to maintain a few standards for a range of wattages: low, medium, and high. This way, you wouldn't accidentally plug in a low-power adapter to charge a high-power notebook. However, I have to say that I love the Apple magnetically-attached laptop charger (despite the obscene price), which "let's go" if you trip over the cord. Hey, maybe that could be the standard!