needing to turn it on and then off for it to charge - this might be just to get the charging symbol.

I'm not on the Nitrus testing team, but on the Karma at least, the hardware does the charging regardless of what's on the screen. So it's as you suspect: The off/on thing just boots the software so it can display the charging symbol. If the symbol weren't there, the player would still be charging.

I think...