Wire Fraud

Forget the hype around the iPhone for a second. All those wireless features and net surfing and music playing and picture taking features are all very nice. But let's get back to basics for a minute.

I'd really like a phone that I could reliably recharge. Yes, that's not a feature that's going to make it into the TV commercials, but it's a feature that will greatly reduce my angst with a phone, and a bunch of other gadgets for that matter.

Because I have to admit, I'm a gadget guy. I like my electronic toys. Mobile phones, digital cameras, Palm Pilots, digital recorders, video cameras. I love to play with them. But the Achilles heel on all of them is the battery. They all have batteries that have to be recharged far too often. This means carrying around with you lots of chargers and wires.

In the past week, I've had no less than three batteries go bad on me. It started with my cell phone. I have a portable charger at my desk at home and my normal routine is to plug it into the charger as soon as I get home. In theory, it can go a few days without needed a recharge, but I like to keep it charged up whenever I can, just in case. So I was surprised to see the battery was dangerously low the other day and I discovered that when I hooked it up to the charger, I no longer got the friendly "optimized charging" message. I fiddled with it and fiddled with it. Occasionally I'd get the connector at just the right angle that it would start charging again but I couldn't put it down without it losing the connection. For whatever reason, the plastic connector had just worn out.

Same thing with my iPod. One day my iPod simply would not turn on. I was freaked out thinking that I had broken it somehow the the thought of being without my iPod and being able to listen to the many podcasts I subscribe too was a downright frightening thought. But after I managed to get my panic under control I figured that it might be the battery. Sure enough, when I hooked it up to the portable charger, nothing. Fortunately, I had a back up el cheapo charger that I'd bought on a business trip when I accidentally left the charger at home. But the main charger was downright busted. The problem this time seemed more on the wall plug side than the iPod connection side. And it pisses me off. I had to spend $30 on this charger at the Apple store when the third gen iPods came out because I only had USB connectors and the out of the box charger didn't support USB. $30 bucks. Down the drain. For no good reason.

The third and final straw came from my portable XM radio, which lives in my car so I can listen to decent music as I commute to work. One day it simply would not turn on. Because this was the third incident in a week, I quickly got savvy to what was going on. The plastic portable charger simply could not keep a decent connection so when I thought I was recharging the radio I actually wasn't.

If you walk into a retail store like the Apple Store or Best Buy you'll pay $20 or $30 for these chargers, which is highway robbery as far as I'm concerned, given that the materials for these probably costs less than a dollar and they are assembled by very cheap labor. Fortunately, on eBay you can find portable chargers for just about everything. And while they advertise them for being just 2 or 3 dollars, by the time you add in all the shipping charges and other fees, you'll end up spending at least ten buck.

The reason I bring this up is that it's not impossible to design a wire connector that works reliably with constant use. I cite as exhibit one, the humble RJE45 connector, also known as the Ethernet connector. When you insert an Ethernet connector into an Ethernet port, it *snaps* into place and you get a reassuring little tactile feedback that lets you know that it is securely connected like it should be. It doesn't come out unless you take deliberate action to take it out. I've never once plugged in an Ethernet connector, gotten that little feedback click and then subsequently had problems with the connection. Not once.

Why can't we have gadget rechargers that work as reliably?