This has to be the best news ever for anyone using a mobile phone. Since my USB-charger that I brought for this trip was broken in Italy and I now have almost no battery left in my phone, this hits very close to home at the moment. Fortunately I'm going to the Montréal Ericsson office today and I have a Sony Ericsson phone, so I should be able to find a charger somewhere there, I guess. It amazes me, though, that it took the industry so long. Chargers are obviously a unnecessary cost to add to a phone. I think I have at least a dozen Sony Ericsson-chargers lying around in my drawers at home. If they could cut that out from the packaging, distribution and support, they could probably save a lot of money. Not to mention the environment, of course.
I've long held that the handset manufacturers should stop packaging chargers with the phones and have the phone stores hand out chargers for free to anyone that wants it, and anyone who, like me, already have a dozen chargers wouldn't have to waste more resources by consuming another meaningless piece of equipment. This could even be a step further in that direction: only one type of charger which means even less meaningless strain on the environment. Let's also hope, since it's USB, that all data-communication with the device will be done through that plug and we'll not need a special cable for that either.
On another note, I'm now in possession of a SunSPOT-kit which I will demo at different kind of events. They are so fun much fun and really, really easy to program. The problem, though, is as always to come up with good demos. Anyone have a fun demo idea for two small Java-computers with accelerometer, light- and temperature-sensors?
