Comment Re:"Not for ________ use" (Score 1) 422
Horseshit. My Belkin powered USB hub at home charges my iPhone 3GS and iPod Touch 2G; my D-Link hub at work and two non-Apple car chargers do the same.
It's able to charge because it's a standard pinout. Go back to Best Buy or whatever it is you do that doesn't require you to know basic stuff like that. A real geek would be ashamed.
Perhaps you should educate yourself before spouting out a bunch of nonsense and insults, because you clearly don't know what you're talking about. The USB standard only allows for a device to draw a nominal amount of power unless the port tells the device it can draw more. Or in other words, a device can't just start charging because it sees 5V across the power pins if it wants to adhere to the specification. Now this presents a problem for a "dumb" charger, which was not considered when the standard was drawn up. The solution that many manufacturers use is to play various tricks with the unused pins in the charger, like put a resistor across them, so the device knows it's hooked up to the dumb charger and can draw more current. Of course, since this is not part of the standard, everyone does it differently, so you can't just pair up any old dumb charger with any old device and expect it to work. Especially when you have companies like Apple who realize that they can sell overpriced chargers this way.