Old MS-DOS and Windows formatted files can be detected as unknown-8bit instead of ISO-8859-X, due to not completely standard encondings. Chardet instead will perform an educated guess, reporting a confidence value.
http://www.faqs.org/faqs/internationalization/iso-8859-1-charset/
If you won't handle old, exotic, out-of-standard text files, I think you can use file -i
without many problems.