Automobile USB Phone Charging

It's nice day for a ride to the beach. You grab your stuff jump and in the car. Ooops - last night you forgot to charge your phone and you've only got about 30% but...... No worries, the beach is a 90 minute drive away which should be more than enough time for your phone to charge.

Fast forward - phone GPS running and some tunes along the way. Park the car, grab your phone and...... #$%@* only 25% charged??  It was plugged in for the entire drive?! You checked it when you plugged it in and the phone was properly connected.

You've been Auto USB'd!

What Happened?

 If your car has a USB port built in - that port is most likely low power, only delivering around .5 Amps. This is considerably less than your phone charging capacity and because you were using the phone GPS, playing some tunes, etc...... well, you get the idea. And if you were using one of those cheapo cigarette lighter adaptor chargers, it is also probably only delivering only around .5 Amps of charging current. The cheap plug ins can get even worse - if you've got one of them with  two USB ports and have a couple of phones plugged in, that .5 Amps total gets split to .25 Amps on each port.

How Much Do You Need?

How much current do you need to get full charging capacity for most phones these days? It depends on the device. Let's use the iPhone as an example - those white chargers that come with the phone are rated at 1 Amp. So, on your drive with GPS running, Bluetooth - and maybe you forgot to switch WiFi off when in the car - your USB adapter .5 Amps of charging current could not keep up with what the phone was drawing, never mind charge it.

What's The Solution? 

To get a quick charge on your phone with a low current adapter probably the best thing to do is to power the phone off when charging. That may not be an option though.

Some of the auto manufactures are putting higher capacity USB ports in cars but that does not help most of us driving older cars. 

If you want to charge your phone and do not want to buy a new car you can purchase a higher current plug in USB charger. Wirecutter has a nice review of some of these chargers here. A little searching on Amazon brings up a bunch of them too - be sure to check the output current per USB port and compare it to what your phone needs. They're a little more expensive than the $2 ones you see in the supermarket checkout line but worth it.

Buy-Anywhere Options, Not Devices, Will Be Key to Digital Publishing Success

I just finished a keynote presentation titled Why Should You Be Interested in Mobile Devices and Application Development? at UMass Boston Mobile Boot Camp. In the presentation I talked a lot about content distribution and how it is changing. Things like App Stores, Software As A Service (SAAS) and how we have different options now in the way we purchase, install and manage our purchased digital content. ABI Research has a new study titled Digital Publishing for Portable Devices, which foresees digital content sales growing to nearly $16.5 billion worldwide in 2016, more than five times their 2010 level. Here's a piece from an ABI press release:

Despite the enormous media focus on iPads, Kindles, Nooks and other eReaders, the market for digital content will not be tied to the success or failure of any single one of these devices, according to the new study. “Consumers can purchase digital texts through their PCs or smartphones, in addition to buying directly through their eReaders,” explains Larry Fisher, research director of NextGen, ABI Research’s emerging technologies research incubator. “The variety of applications that allow people to buy this digital content reassures them that they won’t be tied to a single store—or device—for content.”

Barriers still exist - here's more:

Significant barriers to the growth of digital publishing remain, however, including licensing of back catalog material, the conversion of publishing workflows designed specifically for digital instead of print content, and most importantly for periodicals, pricing. Paying for single issues of magazines and newspapers on the iPad in particular has met with resistance from subscribers accustomed to bargain-priced subscriptions rather than one-off sales. Still, says Fisher, “One-off sales won’t keep publishers from selling content to other device users, and Apple will likely offer some form of subscription service eventually.”

What now things will we see next year?

Digital text sales will get an extra boost in 2012 as some of these challenges are met and high-quality color eInk readers become widely available. Although such readers are currently on the market, they do not offer the full saturation color that print magazine readers have come to expect. Magazine and newspaper readership will still be greater on LCD-screen readers and tablet computers that can handle video and other graphics requiring a fast refresh rate.

 You can get more information on the ABI Research report linked here.