Can anybody advise me if a plug adaptor is all I need to bring my UK phone/charger to the USA? Somebody at work told me I need an electrical transformer to change the voltage too but I am not so sure.

Most phone chargers operate on a wide input voltage range 100-240v, check on the area of the pins it is usually molded into the plastic.

The answer is probably on your charger 'brick'. Take a close look and it will say something like 110-220 or just 220v. If it is 110-220 (most are) then you just need a plug adaptor (£5) rather than a transformer. If you do need a transformer, my advice would be to buy a comparable 'brick' power supply when you get here. Probably cheaper.

Thanks guys.

Check to make sure your phone is triband, too.

depending where in the US, might need a quad band phone instead.

I'm ok on that score. Thanks again.

Regarding the adapter, some power supplies I've come across recently have exchangeable plugs (my older iPhone one has one, several Motorolas I've had have them, my wife's Crackberry has them, too) so instead of having a rickety adapter that'll fall out of the wall on a regular basis, you might be able to just switch plugs on the wall wart.

My tom tom wall adapter is supposed to be like that, it even has pretty pictures of all the other plug adapter bits you can use, which you get.

The US plug is still hard wired in and those tabs to remove the US plug is fixed

If your phone has a mini-USB or micro-USB port, you may just want to buy a universal charger in the US.

Someone has finally gotten smart.

A lot of the resistance to universal ports was so that they could force you to buy a new set of accessories every time you changed phones.

Really smart would be building houses with +5V and +12V DC rails, alongside the AC, so as to eliminate power bricks all together.

Problem with that is that the runs can not be too long, the resistance in the wire would cause the voltage to drop too much. It could also be a big potential fire hazard if you have a short somewhere inside the wall. Low voltage DC is not as harmless as you may think.

It's not a new idea, folks have been talking about it for years.

That could very well be, but I can see many reasons why it isn't universally implemented yet.

but you wouldn't need it all over the house, I've seen it in offices where they have it around a media station, my guess just wired out from the normal plug socket and a few usb type sockets in the wall where your puter/console will be set up to power the periperhals...was a custom built office mind