Cannot charge N900
 

Hi,

I´m abroad and i suddenly had a problem. I cant charge the N900 at all. At first when I moved a little around, it did connect for a while and then after a while ´charger disconnected´. Now it doesnt connect at all. it did work yesterday in poland, doesnt now in germany.

please help as soon as possible. thx

Re: (very very urgent) Cannot charge N900
 

try different usb cables, if they all dont work your usb needs fixing...

well, first idea: try another charger, maybe USB cable at computer or borrow one...

Re: (very very urgent) Cannot charge N900
 

Did you take your digital camera with you? And the charger? You can try to fassion an improvized arrangement to charge your phone battery. All you need is two wires (you can use rolled-up aluminium foil, e.g. from chocolate) and an elastic band or two to keep them in place. Just watch the polarity!

I charged my camera's battery that way twice with my other half's charger when I forgot to pack mine.

Re: (very very urgent) Cannot charge N900
 

Yes it would appear your uUSB needs soldering.
If you are careful that you don't rip it out completely, it will be easy to repair.
You will have to save the charge you have by using the device conservatively

Re: (very very urgent) Cannot charge N900
 

Just buy another phone. No one should have to suffer like this with abundance of good hardware.

Re: (very very urgent) Cannot charge N900
 

if usb dont fixing you can use Travel_Charger

http://img.alibaba.com/photo/5039485...el_Charger.jpg


http://youtu.be/3hC_CRwI7j4

Re: (very very urgent) Cannot charge N900
 

Yeah, that's an advanced variant of my idea. Another option is of course a dedicated BL-5J charger. I did not mention that at the time since the OP may not have had enough time to find one whilst on a trip abroad.

So, marmistrz, what did you do eventually? I am quite curious.

Re: (very very urgent) Cannot charge N900
 

Hi,

thanks 4 ur replies. i couldnt even reply :)

diff cables was my first idea, didnt work,
i was talking with a friend, he thinks that its a problem with usb too
so i cut off the end of my charger and charged directly, its not a state of the art solution but is a temporary workaround.

I ve heard that messing with soldering can damage the transistors and in result a chain reaction when the phone gets utterly kaput (hw bricked)

I might note that I have a spare-testing n900 which has a defect camera and memory card. This might be used for spare parts (and a spare n900 could be loaded even thru and external charger - its not my main phone). and even though, maybe i can find some cheap used for spare parts. maybe this would be a better alternative?

ps, sorrz :) for interpunction and bad stzle :) but german qwertz is a pita :)

Re: Cannot charge N900
 

When you get back to PL give Estel a shout, I believe he has LOTS of experience with fixing USB, no spare parts needed afaik.

Re: (very very urgent) Cannot charge N900
 

Excellent solution, well done! ;)

I only had a few minutes for this using a public WiFi hotspot while passing through the airport. What seemed like good idea at the time doesn't seem so brilliant now that I had a bit more time to think about it. You are lucky your battery survived the ordeal. The USB charger provides quite hard 5V while the battery requires a current supply with variable voltage up to about 4.2V. The only reason nothing serious happened is most likely because the supply wasn't that hard after all and the voltage dropped but I imagine the current was a bit higher than 1.2A - maybe even up to 2A. Worse still, that arrangement has no sense of how charged the battery is and will pump current into it until you switch it off. Doing that regularly is really asking for trouble.

Please note that my suggestion of using a camera charger is different because that has the protection circuit built in. So does the N900 but by connecting the USB wires directly to the battery terminals you have bypassed it. It might have worked in an emergency but please do not do it regularly.

Re: (very very urgent) Cannot charge N900
 

Well, it's indeed a poor solution. I had no other possibility of charging so I did it like that for about 10 days. And the battery died... Pressing the power button does nothing, there's even no lit up diod. When I try to charge it in my replacement N900, the diod lits yellow and dies after half a second.

I measured current, and it shows 3.99 V. What's interesting, even when I connected the voltometer to slots "+" and "0", the current value stayed the same.

Could it be a result of some short circuit?

Re: Cannot charge N900
 

Most likely the controller chip in the battery died. I would expect the battery to get very hot first before the battery itself dies. Either way it is unusable now, time to get a new one - and a stand-alone charger as per one of the previous posts.

Re: Cannot charge N900
 

And what could be the cause of the controller chip's death? I didn't notice the battery to be really hot... Only the charger was warm (or maybe hot)

Re: (very very urgent) Cannot charge N900
 

Lol :)

Off-topic: I have a laptop with a german keyboard, another with an US keyboard. My work PC has a swiss keyboard. I have 3 N900s, one with a german keyboard, another spanish and another polish (which, luckily, is like US).

Sometimes I really really hate computers and modern technology in general.