Fone Forum

"Cheap replacement chargers are flooding into UK shops, undercutting legitimate products while putting punters in danger from badly-made connections and low specifications.

The chargers, some of which bear a forged CE mark, are sold on the cheap and branded as "Travel Chargers".  Trading Standards has issued a specific warning about discount chargers for the Nintendo DS, as well as those marked with an item number of "DE62347066", but the problem is much broader than that.

"The UK appears to be flooded with [dodgy chargers].  It probably runs into hundreds of thousands or even millions," Chris Holden, senior trading standards officer at Buckinghamshire County Council, told the BBC.

With every device requiring a subtly different charger, the market for replacements and spares is huge, and it's not easy to check up on the tests required for a legitimate CE mark.  Getting the mark is expensive and pretty onerous - your reporter had to venture down a salt mine while getting such a mark for a set-top box.

Uncertified devices can overheat and wires can come loose, all for the sake of a price somewhere near a fiver - about a third of the price of the legitimate version.

Hopefully the adoption of mini-USB as a charging standard will reduce the number of chargers we all need and the frequency with which we replace them, but until then it pays to spend a little more for a branded product".

Source:-  The Register (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/07/21/dodgy_dangerous_power/).

I have to agree with the part about the amount of chargers that a person accumulates over time. I personally have a nokia charger, an iphone/ipod charger, psp charger and a LG charger all plugged in at the same time.

it would be so much easier if a universal usb charger was implemented in these devices. ultimately this will never happen as these large companies want to make their money from their accessories.

for example apple will always use their own chargers and docks because they can than charge £15 for a cable that costs pennies to produce.

but as long as people continue to buy the different chargers than the companies will continue to sell them.

this is the reason you see so many fake chargers flooding eBay... i personally would not use one, if you can spend hundreds of pounds on a device than you may as well use the correct charger.

but i do know people who buy these cheap chargers just to save a few pounds regardless  of the damage they can do.