On Sat, 18 Aug 2012 08:08:53 -0400, J. Clarke wrote:
says...
mike writes:
It's certainly possible for there to be a standard
whereby all the contacts were in the same place and the
battery told the charger what to do. That would make
batteries a commodity. The only people to benefit from
that would be consumers...so it's not likely to happen.

I've been thru this with laptop chargers. You buy a UNIVERSAL
laptop power supply. You can get adapters for a mere $9.95
that let you use it with any laptop.
....
The EU got tired of having tens of millions of chargers in
the wastestream annually. They mandated all smartphones use
5V microUSB. The phone manufacturers bitched until they realized
that meant they need not give you one with the phone...Profit!

Apple, of course, balked.

My boss needed to get some pictures to me today that he took with his
iPhone. He was going to email them to me. I said "why not just upload
them to my computer". He'd have had to go get his special cable instead
of using one of the three USB cables I had plugged in (regular, mini,
and micro). Ended up emailing them to somebody. Neither of us has any
idea who but it wasn't me.

If I ever get a smartphone, I'm pretty sure it won't be from Apple.

I was going to say, just get a $5 bluetooth wireless adapter for your
computer, but it appears Apple doesn't support bluetooth to transfer
photos from iPhone 4 to non apple devices.

http://www.ebay.com/itm/Mini-USB-2-0-Bluetooth-V2-0-EDR-Wireless-Adapter-Dongle-Black-/120823946802
https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3761385?start=0&tstart=0

--
jiw