Every week or so, my iPhone reminds me that having and depending on proprietary technological things is awful. I kind of can’t wait for it to die or get lost or become obsolete so I can go back to having a Droid…
If I had a more universal/generic sort of phone, I would have a brilliant way to charge my new Square reader on the go. Just use a male to male micro USB cable! But no, the micro USB to lightning cables only have electricity flowing one way – from USB (read: Square) to lightning (read: iphone)…. Grumble. Well, if you have the new Square or any other tiny electronic device that you would happily let be a little leech on your phone’s battery in a pinch, and YOU have a phone with a micro USB port….YOU can use this solution…
This is of course necessitated by the new Square credit card readers that have a chip reader in them. If you don’t use the chip reader, you’re liable for any fraud there might be. So it’s pretty important to switch to that. And yet, needing a charge makes the Square so very, very much less convenient. You have to carry around the charger with the Square. Square Armor is figuring out a new way to make a nice little case for the new reader, and some versions will probably include a way to carry the mini cord with you. But honestly, it’s going to be bigger than it ever had to be before, and there’s just no way around that.
You would think Square would fix this design flaw. How hard can it be to make a Square reader that plugs right into the real port, rather than the headphone jack, on phones? I get that the headphone jack is more universal, and Droids and iPhones have the same size one on them… but if you can’t get a charge through that jack, it’s not the best one to use. Electricty AND data flow through the USB or Lightning ports…. the Square should plug in to those, and Square should suck up the fact that they need to make two different readers – one for standard/generic/micro-USB-having phones, and one for (stupid) iPhones and their (stupid) proprietary port.
