There is an inevitable and tedious step in owning a mobile phone, which is called charging. Thus far, we have been unable to find technologies to circumvent this step. What’s surprising though is that it we haven’t taken enough advantage of the charging process to do other things, like downloading data to the device.

A few years ago, as in pre-iPod days, the idea of getting mobile phone users to plug their device into a PC was a joke. Very few mobiles came with data cables in the box, plus, due to the lack of USB and plug-and-play, it was almost a sure thing that the PC wouldn’t find the device once plugged in. Device driver errors, weird serial port numbers and other techno-gibberish would confound the average user and even the PC geek. I’ve spent (wasted) far too many cumulative hours of my life fiddling with such things and unhelpful “help” files.

However, these are the days of USB, uPNP, DLNA, Bonjour etc. Also, it is entirely feasible to pack incredible amounts of IP-enabled electronics into the tiniest of packages. Just look at the latest SIM cards that can now host an entire web server in their tiny innards, or those nifty serial-to-ethernet adaptors limited only by the size of the connector!

It’s very easy to make the charger intelligent at low cost by embedding an IP-enabled micro-controller along with some kind of networking chip, perhaps using Homeplug 1.0 (and there’s already a ‘Turbo’ - I love that word. Remember Turbo Pascal?). Imagine all the synchronisation and pre-loading of content that I could do whilst charging.

Imagine that your broadband router is Homeplug enabled. Imagine a world in which I plug in my mobile to charge it and it automatically finds the router and connects back into the network and downloads lots of goodies. The use of pre-loading is well known to enhance the user experience. It is used in some configurations of on-device portals.

Of course, this is what is going on already with the iPhone when charging via USB. It is not a new principle, but moving it to the charging cycle for all phones would allow new types of service, and indeed business models, to emerge based on the pre-loading of content, which is something that I believe will become increasingly important as the speed of home broadband links and cost of memory on devices continues to accelerate in front of the speed and capacity of wireless networks and the capacity of batteries.