By Sarang

This is the dream of all mobile phone users. It is really annoying that each mobile phone manufacturer has its own sets of chargers which are totally incompatible with each other. Every now and then something happens to the mobile phone manufacturers and they decide to change the specifications of the charger. Every time you go and buy a mobile phone you have to pay for the charger as well because there is no other option.

This all will be changing in a few years time. Finally the mess of wires for different models of mobile phones will be history and there will be single charger serving all. In the office if your mobile phone battery charging gets low you will not have to start searching for people with exactly the same model of mobile phone that you have, rather any available charger of any manufacturer will do the job.

On 17 February 2009 the GSM Association along with 17 of leading mobile phone operators/manufacturers have announced that by 1st Jan 2012 most of their mobile phones will be using a Universal Charger. The 17 members who are actively working to make this happen are LG, Motorola, Nokia, Samsung, Sony Ericsson, mobilkom austria, Orange, Qualcomm, Telecom Italia, Telefónica, Telenor, Telstra, 3 Group, AT&T, KTF, T-Mobile and Vodafone. This effort has been going on for quite some time but for the first time a fixed target date has been set.

According to the decision the universal charger interface will be Micro-USB. The decision about the interface was taken in September 2007 by Open Mobile Terminal Platform (OMTP). OMTP is a forum which includes the leading mobile phone operators and manufacturers. Micro-USB is a very slim interface which was introduced by the USB Implementors Forum in early 2007. This interface provides the capability of data communication as well as charging the device.

I am looking forward to this new era of mobile phones and hope to see more standardization.


Sarang Recommends:
- Animal Fat to Fuel
- Handbook for Life

By Sarang

The cars that we drive today will soon be using diesel produced from Animal fat. An ordinary user like us will not be able to differentiate between the normal diesel and the diesel from fat. Even the cars will not feel any difference.

After reading the article Pig Fat by Dr Amjad Khan I became curious about where this huge quantity of animal fat is being used other that the food products. According to a few years old estimate United States alone produces around 11 billion pounds of fat every year from beef, pork and poultry. This is a huge quantity of fat and obviously the livestock industry will never dump it down the drain.

Animal fat has been used as fuel for a long time. It has good burning properties which has been exploited for a long time on a smaller scale. Since it is cheaper source as compared to other fuels like coal therefore there was an attraction to use it. University of Georgia is one of the examples where the schools steam boiler was modified to use animal fat as fuel. It took around $30000 to make this modification which is a big sum. Although the running cost is much lower but the high initial cost keeps people away from it.

Now the next wave has started - In this wave the animal fat is now being converted into diesel. This eliminates the step of using specialized equipment for using animal fat as fuel and the existing engines will be able to use this fuel without requiring any modifications at all. This is indeed a giant leap for usefulness of animal fat.

ConocoPhilips, a big name in oil and gas industry, has teamed up with Tyson Foods, a major meat producer, to make this possible. They have kicked off the production and within a few years they plan reach the capacity to produce 175 million gallons of diesel from animal fat per year. This amounts to about 15000 barrels of diesel per day.

The venture of ConocoPhilips and Tyson has inspiring many other oil and gas industry giants to team up with food industry for similar projects. We will soon be using this new breed of diesel in our cars. This fuel has low amount of Carbon Dioxide and extremely low sulphur contents which makes it very environment friendly as compared to the existing diesel that we use.

How do you feel about this? Do you feel this is a good thing or a bad thing?


Related Links:
Pig Fat by Dr M Amjad Khan