Nokia has just filed a patent for something that looks suspiciously like Apple’s MagSafe. Mmm. That’ll be useful then!

For those of you unfamiliar with MagSafe, it’s a magnetic connection for the Macbook’s power lead. Idea being simply that if you were to tug the power lead accidentally, it would simply disconnect rather than pulling the whole laptop off the table (as has happened to us!). We’ve got it and it works a treat.

But, and there is a but, quite rightly raised by The N95 Blog that phones don’t necessarily require the same kind of protection - in short, Nokia’s trying to solve a problem that doesn’t really exist. Also, with our MagSafe at least, we found it’s become increasingly unreliable - frequently not charging when we thought it was. Be interesting to see if Nokia can beat that problem down. Still, the idea is nice and it’s something properly new. Now, where does this leave universal chargers?