How to recharge a Nikon Coolpix P310

I'm just putting this out there in the hopes that one day someone else will stumble across this and I'll save them some time and head-scratching caused by a bone-headed design decision.

The Nikon Coolpix P310 is a lovely camera, it has great picture quality, fantastic performance in low-light conditions, it's small, rugged, light, and it has great optics. It just has one very annoying design flaw, you can't recharge it from an ordinary USB port.

It comes with a proprietary connection cable, it's USB at one end and something unique at the other end where it plugs in to the camera. I have no idea why they didn't go with mini-USB or micro-USB like, oh I don't know, every other digital camera in existence, but whatever, it'll just really suck to lose it.

Anyway, this one cable is both the data link and the recharging cable, which is why it needs to be USB at one end, so that it can plug in to your computer. The problem is that nowadays a lot of devices recharge using a USB cable, so we've come to expect that if there's a rechargeable device with a USB plug on one end it means we can plug it into a standard 5V 0.5A USB charger and it'll charge-up just fine, if perhaps a bit more slowly than normal. Apple iDevice owners are now covering their mouths with their hands and sniggering at me, but the rest of you are probably nodding along and thinking this is an entirely reasonable notion.

The Nikon Coolpix P310 does not recharge from a standard charger. You must use their proprietary charger before the camera will draw any power whatsoever. It won't even draw power from your computer when you've connected it to download your pictures.

So if you're going-away for a while, not only do you have to cart-around their strange cable, you also have to take their wall charger with you too because that other charger you're taking with you for all your other devices won't work.