How much standardisation do we need in the Mobile space?
By Ben Robinson on Thursday, March 19th, 2009 at 1:51 PM PST In Ideas and rants, The Digital Life
It would seem of late that we might be moving toward a process of standarisation of certain things in the Mobile space – if not standardisation, then at least the distillation of a plethora of variants to a main few. Case in point – most charger manufacturers are committing to get to a universal connector within the next five or so years.
So this got me thinking – what else would I like to see standardised?
Well how about these:
(1) headphone connector – an obvious one, but 3.5mm please. If you want to implement fancy extra data controls (or DRM) over the top of this as a superset that’s fine, but nominally, I want to be able to plug 3.5mmm headphones in to any mobile, and hear sound!!
(2) screens – well, classes of screens anyway. I think we can recognise there are some key form factors for devices, and these need different shape screens – but there aren’t that many when it comes to it. Fixing things like resolutions, and a number of standard screen sizes would make life simpler and cheaper all-round, and would mean that visual content (images, video) wouldn’t have to be re-purposed/stretched for several different devices
(3) DRM – standardise to off please, if it’s serving no actual purpose 
But I bet there are some others, and this is where I’d like to hear from the readers – what say you??!
I’d say the device charging port going to MicroUSB is a good one.
I’d like to see better standards on labeling a device “with Bluetooth”, like maybe a 1 – 5 rating. 1 = headset, 5 = A2DP, full OBEX etc.
Widgets! Right now there are too many different standards for widgets, but most are fairly similar.
And Just Wishing, GSM for all US carriers ON THE SAME FREQUENCIES!
Unlocking? A standard procedure across either manufacturers OR carriers would be nice.
Syncing is another good one! Like when I upgrade from a RAZR to an iPhone, just bluetooth everything over. Easy, but impossible.
Writing out these answers has got me thinking… Let’s start calling devices “unstandard” to force manufacturers into compliance. Shame shame.
-matthew-