How many mobile phones have you owned in your life? Or to phrase the question more accurately, how many phones do you currently use? I often carry in my pocket or “man bag” three phones at any given time. And they’re all made by different manufacturers. And guess what! They all have different charging plugs.

This means I have to plug them in using different chargers. And this becomes a bother when travelling. I most definitely have to carry all three chargers, or else Iw would end up having at least one dead phone during my journey.

This did not use to be the case with my old Nokia phones. Back in the good old days, all my Nokia phones shared a common charging plug, or at least most of them did. You could use the charger on my old 6210 to power up my newer 6100. You could even use it on even newer phones. But when Nokia introduced different series, like the N-series, the E-series, and other new lines, the charging ports all became different. Now my 6500 has a different charging port than my E-series phone. What a bummer!

Don’t even get me started with different brands. I’ve been a veteran of Ericsson and Siemens phones even before those companies got gobbled up by their Asian counterparts (guess which). And then there was my LG phone. And my HTC smartphone. I don’t know how I survived with a mess of charging cables at home. Life would’ve been simpler if each and every phone shared the same charging port (and perhaps the same charging voltage and current ratings).

I could understand if different countries supported different wall outlet types, like the three-pronged ones in the UK, round ones in the US, and straight ones in Asia. But for convenience’s sake, why couldn’t cellphone manufacturers share a single standard?

I guess it would be due to marketing. Having a Nokia charger on hand at home, the office, and everywhere else, would encourage someone to buy Nokia in his next purchase. After all, if everyone had the same plugs, then it would let people just buy any brand, and it will fit conveniently with other brand chargers.

But convenience never took precedence over business sense, has it? And so we are left with different standards. Under our office desks, inside our briefcases, inside our bedside drawers are snake-like figures wanting to attack at any moment. They’re the mess made up of different charging cords with different ends, seemingly calling out “Plug me in!”

To which you would ask “To which phone?”

Maybe one day, when aliens have successfully taken over our planet, they’ll impart the ultimately essential knowledge for living in technological harmony: having a universal mobile charger plug.

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