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The authenticator chips in Apple’s new Lightning connectors put a stop to unauthorised third-party accessories, at least for a little while. In the meantime, authorised third-party accessories are on the way. The first pair are a car charge and a dock from Belkin.
The car charger is pretty run of the mill. One end plugs into your cigarette lighter “power outlet” and the other one goes into your iDevice’s lightning adapter. Simple as that. No holder, no dock, just charging. That’ll run you about £25. The other — stranger — accessory is a dock, but catch this: it doesn’t actually come with a connector. You can place your iPhone on it, and use it for audio out, but unless you snake your own cable through it, it can’t charge. BYOC. That one is £25-odd as well, but it’s effectively £50 at least if you count that extra piece you’ll have to pick up from Apple.
You can registered to be notified about UK availability of both of them now, if you’re desperate, and are due to ship mid-November in the Americas at least. The car charger’s fine, but hopefully adapter-less docks aren’t about to become a trend. If so, you better hope those working knock-off Lightning cables start rolling out, and fast.
i am guessing Apple won’t let anyone license making the usb/lightning lead yet, until they have lined their pockets first. hence no cable.
On a side note, I have always liked belkin products, quality has alway been good in everything i have bought, and despite their customer support being outsourced, it is very good, twice i have used them for faults of my own making, on my routers and despite me meddling with stuff, they gladly helped fix it.
I have never come across another company that uses outsourced customer service that i would ever want to use again, but belkins, I am more than happy.
Yeah, a simple audio dock now needs a DAC, so to reduce the price they’re using the analogue headphone out jack and omitting the data connector entirely. Hardly ideal, and that’s not a method that Apple are likely to advocate. In Apple’s vision, the world uses Airplay or Bluetooth anyway.
What’s worse, due to the Lightning connector’s reversible design, even a simple charger needs an interface chip to negotiate the connection before charging can start.
I can see what Apple are going for here. Lightning is a future-proof design that comes at the expense of design simplicity, but this is where we, the consumers, pay the price.