Universal chargers for cell-phones

An older piece of information, but important nonetheless:

Xbitlabs has a news article about the future of phone chargers. The future does sound better in light of this news. I must confess I always found the various phone producers' decision to have hordes of different charger models quite distasteful. Sure, they could use an additional source of income, but it was utterly wasteful from an ecological point of view, very unfriendly from the user's point of view ...and I'm not sure how profitable it really was, if the companies actually agreed to this change.

I wonder if the provided dates will be maintained. At least I hope that my next phone will be able to use one of these universal chargers. In case the link to the article doesn't work, here's the most important piece of the news:

The GSM Association and 17 leading mobile operators and manufacturers today (note: 02/17/2009) announced that they are committed to implementing a cross-industry standard for a universal charger for new mobile phones. The aim of the initiative, led by the GSMA, is to ensure that the mobile industry adopts a common format for mobile phone charger connections and energy-efficient chargers resulting in an estimated 50% reduction in standby energy consumption, the potential elimination of up to 51 thousand tonnes of duplicate chargers and the enhancement of the customer experience by simplifying the charging of mobile phones.

The group has set an ambitious target that by 2012 a universal charging solution (UCS) will be widely available in the market worldwide and will use micro-USB as the common universal charging interface. The group agreed that by the 1^st January 2012, the majority of all new mobile phone models available will support a universal charging connector and the majority of chargers shipped will meet the high efficiency targets set out by the OMTP (Open Mobile Terminal Platform), the industry body who developed the technical requirements behind UCS.

A universal charger will make life much simpler for the consumer, who will be able to use the same charger for future handsets, as well as being able to charge their mobile phone anywhere from any available charger.