Ssiiiihht: that’s the sound that a consumer makes when she buys a spare phone/laptop charger – the sharp intake of breathe that comes from paying a considerable premium for a lump of dumb plastic and metal. Given that the manufacturer already has a captive audience (you’ve already bought the product) and the the customers need is great (the product is useless without power) is it any surprise that manufacturers charge a premium for additional power supplies?
There will come a day when (some) phone/tablet/laptop chargers will be given away for free. What will make this feasible is: a charger that can measure the power that flows through its wires; a way of identifying the owner of the power supply and/or the device that is drawing the power; and a method for automatically billing the consumer when the power is drawn from supply.
Electricity sold at a premium – for the convenience of always being within a few meters of a power supply – will consumers go for it? Would you?
Photo? Been hot-desking this week, with a power supply in tow.
5 Comments
A variant of this biz model is already happening in some places. In some shopping centers in Portugal you have coin activated power/charging stations for cell phones. you go up to it, pay and you get electricity.
In another other variant you can charge up your phone in some restaurants IF you buy food…
Good to know that as of January 2011, following new (self) regulation in the mobile phone industry initiated by the EU, all mobile phones sold in the EU will fit the same, one-size-fits-all charger.
Not to save money but for environmental reasons!
http://www.earthtimes.org/articles/news/337270,2011-eu-commission-says.html
Vasco: yes, and a few examples have been documented here over the years. But what is different than what has gone before is that the plug/device itself comes with the ability to pay-as-you-go, and reward the electricity provider. The examples you use are provided by companies – the change will support micro-entrepreneurs the convenience store, the kiosk and so on.
Monique: the regulations are interesting, one of the hidden benefits that will filter through the ecosystem is that the same cable will be used for data transfers – essentially it is also a standardisation on the way to get data on and off the device. Not a big issue in smartphoneland today, but for the majority using feature/featureless phones it a real internet-extender.
Ahhhh, “Ssiiiihht”! I read wrong, I thought it was “Thhhhh!” as per this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XuFe5lqBAYE
xx
Or in the far future – a self-charging battery/power-source, which uses all the possible existing sources around — magnetic fields, solar, light, motion(piezo-electricity), touch (e.g. human-contact generating tiny charges), nano-generators using the heat generated inside the laptop/mobile,etc…
One Trackback
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Sani Elfishawy, UX Feeder. UX Feeder said: Future Perfect: Things That Make You Go Ssiiiihht: Ssiiiihht: that’s the sound that a consumer makes when she buys… http://bit.ly/dt2p4o [...]