Re Desperado,

I don't know who fed you that line but the issue with charging newer ipods from a car or older USB to iPod cable was that the original iPod was designed to charge via Firewire and used different pins on the dock connector for charging the battery. Today most iPods and iPhones are USB only devices. Some of the older charging cables were actually just re-routing the USB power to the "firewire" pins on the connector. It worked but could cause the iPod to over draw the source since USB doesn't provide as much power as firewire, no real hazard for the iPod but it could damage a cheap USB driver circuit. The more recent devices no longer use those pins so they are correctly reporting that they cannot charge when power is present on those pins instead of the expected "USB" pins.

Newer charges will say something like made for iPhone, I think.

- Eric