Last year European carrier O2 announced that it would be trialling a program that would see it sell the HTC One X+ without a wall charger. The company explained that around 70 percent of customers already have a charger that they can use, so including another with a new device is wasteful. Now the results of that test are out, and it looks like things went even better than O2 had predicted.
O2 has announced that its “Charger Out Of The Box” saw 82 percent of customers that bought the One X+ opt not to buy a separate wall charger, beating its estimate of 70 percent. The carrier went on to say there are 30 million phones being sold in the U.K. each year, and so if these test results were applied to all of those devices, there would be 24 million fewer chargers sold every year.
Many of the chargers used by recent smartphones accept a regular USB-to-micro-USB cable, meaning that most smartphone owners probably have a charger laying around. The major exception to this is the Apple iPhone line. There there is the push to wireless charging as a standard feature, which will reduce the need even more.
O2 notes that customers that do need a charger are able to buy one at cost. However, so few customers opted for the charger that O2 plans to continue its “Charger Out Of The Box” push, pledging to sell all of its phones without a pack-in charger by 2015.
