The GSM Association announced at Mobile World Congress yesterday that most phone manufacturers will use an energy-efficient charger with a universal Micro-USB connector. There are a number of benefits, including less money out of consumer's pockets when they get a new phone as they won't have to buy extra chargers for travel or replacement car chargers to fit their new phone.The press release claims that the chargers will use 50% less energy in standby mode and up to 56,000 tons of duplicate chargers will be eliminated. In the last few years, most of the phones I've purchased have been made by HTC and they all use the mini-USB plug, which has been nice. I have a charger in my bedroom, the den, and one in the bag that I take to work and on trips. Some of you may have car chargers as well, and a select few may even have portable battery packs that allow you to recharge your phone one or two times before having to find an electrical outlet. If you had to replace some or all of those when you got a new phone with a different connector, it could easily cost $100 or more and the old chargers are sent to a closet somewhere or to a landfill to occupy space. The target roll-out date is 2012. Some companies already use Micro-USB, but they may not be using the energy-efficient specs announced in this initiative. Companies like Motorola, Nokia, T-Mobile, Samsung, and 13 others already have signed up. Oddly enough, Apple, Palm, and HTC are absent from this list, as are CMDA carriers such as Sprint and Verizon. Hopefully, the holdouts, as well as CDMA players, will jump on board, saving all of us the expense and hassle of replacing multiple chargers with each new phone, allowing us to save on electricity and reduce the amount of junk sent to the landfill. I also wouldn't shed a tear if nonphone manufacturers, such as those that make MP3 players or personal gaming systems, adopted these measures.

Anyone think we'll ever see a universal phone replacement battery? No? I didn't think so.