Scosche Industries is putting out an iPod/iPhone charger that doubles as a nightlight.

The comapny’s second such charger promises a smaller footprint and tighter stability on your outlet.

Scosche also added a USB port to the reviveLITE II, so you can charge another USB powered device while powering up your iPod or iPhone.

And a-scared of the dark, you have a nifty LED nightlight.

It’s available now for $24.99 online and at retailers.

The charging system comes in two parts. The first, the WildCharger Pad, plugs into a wall like any other charging base station. The pad is a simple, flat surface that you lay your device on. There are no sliding parts, no grooves to line up, no orientation to match — you just toss your device onto the pad and it automatically starts charging. I tried placing my iPhone in many different directions and playing around with it, but I was unable to find a orientation separate from being of the pad where the WildCharger failed to charge.

The trick, which the engineers took no effort to hide, is the twelve strips of metal in the pad that generate a potential. The second component to the system is the case you attach to your device. The iPhone case I tested has metal contacts on the back of the case in a “T”-shape. They were spaced out in just the right proportions that at least one of them would connect to a different strip of metal on the pad, completing a circuit, and generating the charge for the device. Because the pad is larger than your devide, you can also cram as many devices on the pad as you want.

So while the WildCharger Pad is technically wireless, it still requires metal contacts to transmit the power. This means that you couldn’t put something over the pad and expect it to charge. Also, should the contacts on the case ever become oxidized, it will become unable to charge.

WildCharger's universal adaptor can let you charge just about any device.

Even with these possible limitations, the technology is promising.  The company is currently developing laptop chargers. Looking even further into the future, the company hopes to put all of these devices in cafes, restaurants, and bars, eliminating the need to fight over outlets. We’ll just hope no one spills something on them. That would probably be bad.

While I used the iPhone case, the company sells cases for the iPod Touch and Blackberrys, as well as generic adapter to most phones or other devices. The case is rubber which covers the phone while also preventing scratches and other damage to the phone. The case isn’t too difficult to remove, which is a good thing since in order to charge your iPhone or iPod Touch, the WildCharger has to be plugged into the dock port on the phone, preventing you from syncing with your computer while the skin is on the case. Though many other skins cover or otherwise obscure the port, it’s still is a hassle to have to take it off anytime you want to sync your device.

Overall, I think the WildCharge is a great product, and if the WildCharger pads start to show up at my local Starbucks, we certainly wouldn’t complain. At this point, you just have to ask yourself how much the convenience of not having to charge your device with a wire is worth to you.

OK, so that’s slightly dramatized, but we’ve all felt the sting of needing an inexplicably different cell phone charger for every phone we’ve owned. Why are they different, you ask? Just because. However, change is afoot — at least in Europe — where cell phone manufactures have agreed to all use micro-USB as the standard for charging and data transfer on their phones.

At the behest of the European Commission of the EU, manufacturers ranging from Nokia, Sony Ericsson, Apple, Motorola, and many others have all agreed to an industry-wide standardization. These companies control 90% of the phone market in Europe, so this is nothing to scoff at. The EU hopes that this will reduce the amount of waste thrown into landfills (though we feel like one charger every couple of years is a whole lot less than say, the one or two water bottles we throw away every week, but every little bit counts).

The universal chargers will initially be bundled with the phones, but eventually phones will not come with a charger at all, in the hopes that consumers will be reusing them. The price of the chargers is yet to be determined.

While this is only Europe-wide at the moment, the hope is that the world will follow suit, for both convenience and the environment’s sake.

The ICX360500 (InCharge for Xbox 360), ICWII200 (InCharge for Wii) controller charges have been forged by a Chinese company called Wellform Industrial Ltd. from Guangdong.

The counterfeit products bear falsified UL Marks for the United States and Canada and have not actually been verified by the UL for safety.

UL doesn’t know exactly when the fake products were made or how many were produced. They appear to be regularly sold on Amazon.com.

Blast reviewed the real charger late last year.

The charger is a simple dock that plugs into one of the USB ports on the back of the Wii. The Charger has a light on the front that is steady green when charging, then starts blinking green when it is finished.

Penguin United claims the battery pack will last for up to thirty eight hours. The Wii makes it easy to find out how long the battery lasts. It keeps track of how long people play games on the Wii.

So to test this battery, and the claim that goes with it, out, the battery was entirely charged on a Friday, and then played until the battery died. I then added up all the time playing the Wii. This added up to sixteen hours. This was less than they claimed, but part of it can be credited to battery loss when the Wii Remote wasn’t actually being used or on standby.

Sixteen hours is plenty of time for a Wii Remote since the charger can charge the batteries overnight. I found that from my tests if you put the Wii Remote onto the charger every night that the battery pack will never run out on the user. Penguin United is also now selling packages with multiple batteries this way the charger can be shared between both remotes, and again as long as the Wii isn’t used for more than 16 hours in a row it shouldn’t be a problem.

Unfortunately though, it is not compatible with any of the third party Wii Remote covers. It would be nice if there was a way to still plug the Wii Remote into the charger with a case on it.