Good news everyone, it looks like we may soon have the likes of an Universal Power Adapter. This means that you don’t need a ton of adaptors for your individual notebooks, mobile phones, mp3 players or anything that requires an external power source or charger. Won’t it be great if one day, you just need a single adaptor for your electronic devices everywhere you go? No longer will you forget to bring one adaptor for your mobile phone or the other adapter for your PDA phone, it’s going to be universal! Well, that is if everyone (those big multi-national manufacturers) agrees on this.

I am sure that if you had purchased an extra adapter before, let’s say for your notebook, you would realize that the price for the adaptor isn’t exactly cheap. In fact, for my most recent purchase of my friend’s adapter (AC to DC Adapter), it cost about S$70! You can get a battery for that price! And if you are going for OEM adapters (with the same voltage and maximum current), some of the head of those OEM adapters are of different size and thus cannot fit into your device. Pretty smart move by the manufacturer as this force you to purchase their own adaptors for ridiculously high prices. But unless you are a techie, you have no choice but to buy it.

Anyways, the concept of the Universal Power Adapter is that the adapter reads the information from the device and from there it gets the necessary voltage and current. Of course, the device needs a firmware with the information embedded somewhere in the first place. Thus support from device manufacturers is very important. Without the firmware embedded in the devices, this adaptor becomes useless. The company that makes this adaptor and supplies the technology is called Green Plug. The main aim of the company is to save the environment as if this concept takes off, we will see much much fewer adaptors and thus less waste. And not to mention, we can re-use the old adaptors for our new devices.

Another advantage is that the lower cost due to there being no need to ship adapters in their products can help attract customers due to the lower price and to sell more products. Not only cost of adaptors, but packaging, servicing, exchanges, repairs are also reduced as we go “universal”. I think that this is really a very good idea. It benefits both the customers and the producers. And it helps the environment. Imagine if you have 3 mobile devices like a PDA, your mobile phone and your Blackberry and each needs their own individual adaptors to charge. Thus, you will need to bring along all 3 adapters on your travels or to your workplace and at home. But now, with just one adapter, you can charge all the devices (maybe not ALL at the same time)! Isn’t it so much convenient to bring just one adapter?

For more information, please take a look at this article: Support Grows for universal power adapter.