A Tangle of Cables

If a common question emerged from our CES blogging team, it was "Why do Vegas taxi drivers take the insane routes to get from one hotel to another?" But after that, it was "Why are there so many problems in getting gadgets to charge?" With devices using more and more juice every year, our straw poll indicated that everyone on the Yahoo! team had experienced some kind of problem keeping their batteries topped off. Part of the issue is incompatible and non-standard connectors -- the iPod is probably the worst example of this, featuring a connector that nothing else on earth uses.

But another part of the puzzle is proprietary cables (that is, you may need an XYZ-branded cable instead of a generic one) and even proprietary software to charge a device. The most notorious example of this in recent months is the original Motorola RAZR, which could charge via USB, but only to a PC, and only if you had Motorola's special $40 program running on that PC.

So we're calling the industry out! Standardize the connections, and get rid of the proprietary detritus keeping us from the juice. DRM is bad enough on our music and movies. It's wholly unacceptable on our power sources.