By this time next year, people in the European Union who buy a new mobile phone will be enjoying the first universal phone charger that will work across brands.

As we reported back in February, it was announced at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain that mobile phone manufacturers have agreed to a plan to make chargers universal across handsets to reduce on the number of them that is thrown in to the world’s landfills.  The plan was to have this new policy in place by 2012, and all of the major companies had agreed to the plan with the exception of Apple.

Well, now news has come out that Motorola, Apple (yes, they have now joined in), LG, NEC, Qualcomm, Research in Motion, Samsung and Texas Instruments have agreed to move up the plan to 2010.  These companies represent 90% of the sales of data-enabled phones in Europe, and phones with data services represent 50% of the phones in all of Europe.  There is no specific mention of when we will see this policy come to the United States, but it is unlikely that the companies will make over version of everything for Europe, and another for the USA.

This new policy will allow consumers to share chargers, retain chargers after switching phones, easily locating a new charger at pretty much any store and so on.  This is nothing but a win for consumers, and one that has been a very long time in coming.