PCMag is reporting today that members of their staff have followed the tech-heavy CES event by heading to the AVN Adult Entertainment event and noticed that the porn industry seems to have unanimously selected MicroUSB for their, um, charging needs.
In the past, the porn industry has helped push standards (see VHS vs. Beta, and more recently Blu-ray vs. HD DVD), and this latest trend could help give MicroUSB the push it needs to be the standard across most tech appliances. Currently MicroUSB is used by HTC and other phone manufacturers, and is the standard for most digital cameras.
Quoting PCMag: “It looks like many in the porn industry are getting on board as well, with a new crop of vibrators that can be charged from the comfort of your PC. From now on, you’ll only have to pack one cable for those long business trips.”
Result for: digital cameras
According to VideoBusiness, Blu-ray Disc set-top players continue to drop in price, and one analyst expects to see at least one $50 USD player on Black Friday.
Last year was dominated by off-brand, cheaper players such as those by Sylvania or Memorex but name brand, Internet-enabled players, most with video streaming from Netflix are becoming to be standard at under $200 USD.
Says Abt Electronics owner Jon Abt: “We are doing better than we initially expected, which is due to the price drops. The price drops were expected, but we didn’t think it would be this deep this quickly. BD Live players [most of which offer streaming movie services] are now available in sub-$200 models.”
Abt also says the company is selling 50 percent more BD units year-on-year.
More notably, NPD Group says 14 percent of all Blu-ray set-top sales this year are for sub-$200 models whereas last year that number was under 1 percent.
A few of the more feature-packed players available right now for under $200 are the Panasonic DMP-BD60 ($150), the Samsung BD-P1600 ($180) and the LG BD370 ($160), all of which offer Netflix, Amazon VOD, CinemaNow or Pandora.
“We’ve seen very strong growth in Blu-ray players this year. It has been a bright spot in a very gloomy industry landscape,” said Ross Rubin, NPD director of industry analysis. “Nearly all other electronics device categories have been down, such as digital cameras and MP3 players.”
As for Black Friday deals on BD players? Rubin says he can see a $50 USD BD player.
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Result for: digital cameras
The International Telecommunication Union (ITU), a body of the United Nations (UN), has approved a universal mobile phone charger that will work with all future handsets.
The body says that over 51,000 tons of redundant chargers are used or thrown out each year and that the new energy-efficient chargers will reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 13.6 million tons, each year.
Because many companies such as LG and Samsung use proprietary chargers, users throw out their chargers when they switch phones, leading to waste. The new universal chargers would allow users to keep just one charger for years at a time, even if they choose to upgrade their handsets.
“This is a significant step in reducing the environmental impact of mobile charging,” added Malcolm Johnson, director of ITU’s Telecommunication Standardisation Bureau. “Universal chargers are a common-sense solution that I look forward to seeing in other areas.”
The new charger will be micro-USB, used today in most Motorola and HTC handsets. The technology is the same that is used by most digital cameras.
Unfortunately manufacturers have to volunteer to accept the new charger, and it is likely many will not given the amount of money they make off selling overpriced proprietary chargers.
