Micro USB madness... is there a fix?

[Buzz]

Baby Buzz's cell phone is being charge resistant, the micro usb adapter has to be wiggled into a "just so" position in order to start charging, and then, even while laying perfectly still on the floor or table, the charging will stop. It doesn't matter which adapter is used, they all behave the same, so best guess is that it's the micro usb port on his phone that is problematic. Other than swapping phones, are there any other options to get his phone to take a charge in user friendly fashion? BTW, his is the only one that takes that specific battery, otherwise if we had another compatible phone in which to charge the battery, we would have done that already. Thanks,

Buzz
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[John B.]

The micro usb port on my Motorola phone does this from time to time. Sometimes a blast of compressed air seems to help (perhaps dust/dirt is accumulating in the port).

[rgG]

What about one of those inductive chargers, where you just lay the phone on the charger to charge?

[rz]

get an iPhone

[OWC Jamie]

There you go, lay the phone near your tooth brush.


Mine is always the adapter side.
Car one seems to be the worst. for going bad.

[cbelt3]

I'll concur that cleaning the sucker out will help (Remember the old Nintendo 64 "Blow on the contact" solution ? )

Also, take a clean ultra fine paint brush ('hair line' brush). Dip in 90% alcohol. Clean contacts. Blow dry with dry canned air.

[Carm]

Port could be damaged. Happened to me. I had a car charger that would only charge when wiggled. After a few times charging it, the port broke inside. I got a replacement phone and tried charging it with another car charger, all was fine. After going back to original charger that would only work when wiggling, i needed to do the same thing with the new phone and ended up trashing the original charger.

[Buzz]

Will try the alcohol thing... port has been blasted w/ zero proof air already. Phone behaves badly w/ all chargers, auto & home, close to a dozen, so pretty sure it's the phone's port. Other phones work OK w/ all same chargers. May also try some high power magnification to see if anything can be seen in the port.

iPhone not available on Sprint, yet... don't want re-up a new phone, in hopes iPhone shows up in fall as anticipated.

Will look into inductive charging, but not sure if working access to micro usb is required, if not, might be viable if charging unit isn't too expensive.

Thanks :-)

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[Jimmypoo]

sounds to me like a bad solder of the port to the phone's board.

Any time you wiggle and get some contact - it's usually a cracked solder
or, as I had once on my Mac II, a line one of the layers of the board had cracked -
and it needed the extra weight of having the card slots filled to put enough
downward pressure on it to clear up the problem.

I could literally put my fingertip on the right place, and push down, and the problem
would clear up. I ended up using a roll of dimes in just the right place.

You can imagine the motherboard costs back then, and the blood pressure that
was relieved when the roll of dimes fixed the problem. I just realized, I probably still
have that $5 in that machine right this moment -- which is more than the machine!!

[bazookaman]

maybe it's too hot.