Matt Rammelkamp's Blog: Europe getting a Lightning-to-Micro USB adapter

Europe getting a Lightning-to-Micro USB adapter

If you've been watching the European Union at all over the past two years or so, you may have noticed way back in December 2010 when CENELEC (the European Committee for Elecrotechnical Standardization) and ETSI (European Telecommunications Standards Institute) both declared their intentions for Micro USB to be standardized charging connector for mobile devices sold in the bounds of the EU. By and large most manufacturers have abided by that, though they've more gone for Micro USB out of convenience's sake. Save on consistent and obvious hold-out: Apple and their 30-pin connector.

Now that the 30-pin connector has gone the way of the dodo, the new 8-pin Lightning connector is going to be the standard for Apple mobile devices for several years. For reference's sake, the 30-pin connector had a long life of nine years.

But what of CENELEC, ETSI, and other acronyms? Apple in Europe has a typically Apple-for-Europe solution: a Lightning-to-Micro USB adapter. It's certainly the smaller of the Lightning adapters made available, and it merely has the male end of the Lightning connector on one end, ready to plug into your iPhone 5, new iPod Touch, or new iPod Nano, and a female Micro USB port on the other, ready to accept your Micro USB cable for your charging and syncing needs.

As the owner of multiple devices, it's the kind of thing I wish Apple would sell world-wide. Practically everything else I own charges off of Micro USB, and the drawers of my house are littered with compatible cables and chargers. The little �15.00 adapter might be a tad on the expensive side, but I'd rather throw that in my go bag over yet another cable. Alas, the Micro USB adapter appears to be a Europe-only offering, there exclusively to satisfy the "must have a Micro USB port or an available adapter" demands of Europe's standards agencies.

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