I’ve been noticing a lot more standard USB cables lately. Instead of putting their own proprietary cable on their devices (so you have to buy a new cable from them), gadget manufacturers are using, mostly, the tiny 5-pin USB connector. This means I can just leave a connector on my computer (or on more than one) and plug the device in without having to search for its’ specific cable. This is true for my SportBrain pedometer, (which I recently lost, d’oh – it had a tendency to fall off my belt) (but it used to only come with a dock for telephone connection), my Nikon camera (the old one came with a proprietary USB cable that’s almost but not quite the same, and tended to be too tight in the connector), and my GPS (the old one had only serial port connection). The iPod still wants its own cable for USB, tho I have an older iPod which uses the standard firewire connector. Phone – still a bizarre proprietary connector, and I have no reason to use it since they don’t have address book sync and the Sprint data connection is flaky. I got rid of my Palm, but it had its own connector (which is one of the reasons I didn’t dock it all that often, having to mess with the cable), and I always said that was one of the problems with the Newton, lack of USB (tho it was just prior to USB being standardized).
There’s still the problem of software, though. Most of the manufacturers don’t support Mac or Linux, so you have to rely on either Apple or the software writers out there to provide drivers or other operating software. The phone has none for the Mac and only aftermarket for Windows. The GPS has only shareware for the Mac or Linux. The palm had crappy sort-of-supported abandonware on the Mac. iPhoto is marvelous enough that I wonder why Nikon bothers to make a Mac photo program, tho they do.