One of the trends we’ve seen lately has been USB charging: it’s everywhere. With microUSB now the standard for mobile phones (except the iPhone), it’s only a matter of time until USB charges your laptop computers.
The people behind the USB standard have come up with a change to the port that should bring with it more power, with an increase from the 5 watts most USB power packs send out to a maximum of 100 watts.
These days, laptops are packaged with a variety of power packs, with numbers ranging from 30W to 65W. Few tablets can be charged from the standard 5W USB power supply either, with the Apple iPad 2 requiring a 10W charger and the Asus Eee Pad Transformer bundling in a 15W.
The good news is that once this solution is in place, you won’t have to lug all of your adaptors with you from place to place, as it should create a “one size fits all” scenario and provide only the power the device needs. With a surplus of electricity in this update to the USB specification, laptops could well be charged from a USB port.
However, we don’t expect this new development to start going into action until 2012 at the earliest, so keep your plug packs in your hand luggage for the moment.
