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Mobile phone charger to be standardised

Telecoms analyst Dean Bubley, of Disruptive Analysis, pointed out the possible implications for some manufacturers. Speaking to CNET.co.uk's sister site ZDNet.co.uk on Thursday, he explained that proprietary interfaces helped manufacturers control the market for accessories, which can be quite high-margin.

However, he also suggested that having a standard connector might be in manufacturers' best interests due to environmental reasons. The EU's WEEE directive makes manufacturers responsible for some of the costs associated with recycling their equipment, and a broadly applied standard could remove the need for a new charger to be distributed with every phone or accessory.

"This is cheaper to the manufacturer, and also results in a smaller, less heavy box -- which reduces on shipping costs, storage costs, warehouse costs and so on," said Bubley. "It has got to have beneficial effects for everyone."

Nick Allott, chief technical officer for the OMTP, agreed that manufacturers stood to gain more through standardisation than they would lose: "The very fact that our membership was prepared to sit down and agree in the first place shows that the benefits outweigh the marginal competitive advantage that individual manufacturers might have had."

"We're speeding up the inevitable," Allott added, pointing out that the Chinese government has also recently mandated micro-USB as the future national standard for phone chargers. "OMTP itself has no power to do anything, but by making that statement that includes our membership -- representing about 85 per cent of the GSM market -- we are making a strong public statement that, as an industry, this is the way we want to go."