My trusty little design blog gets a depressing percentage of traffic to the one article i posted about my old iPhone’s occaisional problems with receiving calls. In that spirit, here’s a quick post that explains why your brand new iPhone 3Gs will not charge with the car charger from your old iPhone.

It turns out that old iPhones and most models of dock connector iPods were designed to charge with both a Firewire pin OR a USB pin on the dock connector end of the charger. The new 3Gs, for reasons I don’t entirely understand, will only charge with USB. Chances are, if you’re getting the iPhone error message that says that your trusty old third-party charging device doesn’t work with your brand new phone, the device charges with Firewire and you have to go buy a new car charger. It’s as unfortunately simple as that.