Are USB charger cables bad for your PDA?

[adeprice]

Hi,

I used to be an NZ90 owner but got fed up with poor battery performance. I considered making my own standalone BP500 charger so that I could charge a spare battery while using another one.

I recently found this article:-
http://www.houseofbatteries.com/HowTo/Lion.htm

Notice the phrase "Li-ion will not tolerate overcharge conditions and therefore cannot be trickle charged."

This would mean my standalone charge would be harmful to battery life so I shelved the idea. Then I got thinking, could the USB charger/sync cable harm Lithium/Ion battery ?

Over to you....

[zwergnase]

adeprice, don't you worry here.
The issue is not the battery or the USB cable.
The issue is the charge controller circuit.
As long as the circuit used to control the charge is designed to handle Lithium Ion batteries, there is no problem.
*Every* battery charger needs a control circuit, or otherwise you risk overcharging the battery all the way to explosion.
The issue with the "trickle charge" is sometimes also reffered to as "topping off".
A technique to intentionally put a current higher than normal on a battery to topp it off. Older battery types have a problem with holding a steady current at lower charges, thus their current stabillity is not as good, and they require such an "extra push" to get them fully charged again.
LiIo batteries don't have this issue, thus no "over voltage" technique shoud be used here.
LiIo charge circuits know that and are designed accordingly.
As long as voltage and amperage are correct, your charger couldn't care less where the power comes from. So its the charge controller that counts, not whether the juice comes from your USB cable or not.

[rclodfelter]

I have used one for quite some time and have had no problems.

[dochate]

Same here. I use my Brando charger while at work and on travel. I have never run into problems.