Wall charger

[gripweed22]

I bought a 4 USB wall charger so it's convenient to just take that, then the cables for my phone, iPad and iPod.

The charger is 5V, 2A, which is 10W...just like the one that comes with the iPad.

However...when I plugged the iPad in, it wouldn't charge.

Do they have something that only lets it charge off of other apple products or what? I see there is a similar product energizer is about to release that totes it's capable of charging the iPad, but again, because of the 10W.

Any ideas?

[cxc273]

There is nothing Apple-specific that's required to charge an iPad. The 10-watt charger works best because of the iPad's higher power requirement than the iPod or iPhone.

I've managed to charge my iPad using non-Apple USB chargers. You just have to keep in mind that it may take a lot longer. This is also the case when I plug may iPad into my Macbook Pro. It will charge, but it takes a while compared to the 10-watt charger.

I would leave your iPad plugged into the new charger overnight and see if it's charged by morning. If it's not charged by morning, you might have an incompatible charger.

[gripweed22]

Mine actually says "not charging" by the battery icon.

[kornchild2002]

Which is normal. Turn your iPad's display off and it will actually charge. The same thing happens to most people with Windows notebook when they plug their iPads in as well. It says not charging but, after the iPad is done syncing, they can turn the iPad's display off and it will actually charge although at a very slow rate. The 10W charging specifics don't automatically make something compatible with the iPad, that is a generalization that may or may not apply. A USB charger must specifically state that it is iPad compatible or else it may not work. You are also forgetting that the power requirements listed on your charger may be for when it is charging via all USB ports under maximum load (which is normally the case for power requirement labels). That means that the whole device is sucking up 10W instead of just one port and it doesn't sound like your AC charger has power switching so each port receives the standard amount of USB 2.0 compliant power (i.e. it cannot divert more power to a single port when it is the only one being used).

So you can either buy an AC adapter that says "Made for iPad" (there are a bunch of third party ones out there, Apple isn't the only one who makes them) or just turn your iPad's display off and give it almost twice the amount of time to charge up.