I would advise anyone with a phone to have that. Makes life easier, and they're rather cheep. I picked up a 5800 battery charger for $3, and a spare battery for under $10. Worth the investment IMHO. If nothing else it gives you a way to power the phone to get data off it before sending it off to be repaired if the port does go completely.

That's not entirely true. As I noted above, the disconnect can manifest in many ways. Usually the symptom is noted first in charging, but then most people don't use data constantly where everyone has to charge. It could very well be an initial sign that the port is coming loose. It could be that leverage issues have caused his data pins to disconnect first (they are smaller pads).

The "fix" for dumb cables, btw, is to short the middle two data pins. That usually means taking the changer apart, or splicing it's cable. Doing that tells the controller it's a "dumb" charger and it should just pull whatever load it can from it. Be careful with that though, as it will try to pull up to 500ma from it. If the supply can't sustain it, you could burn out the supply eventually.

I would suggest a pin and a very thin piece of non-dust cloth, maybe dipped in some mild non-oxidizing cleaning fluid. Opening the phone won't help much to be honest, since the port is VERY deep in the device. To get to it you need to basically disassemble the whole thing, and it will still have it's port cover even if you do take it apart.

Unless you're a pro at working with small devices, I would not advise it.

It could be... A "simple" way to diagnose it would be to setup an alternate boot OS (like Android) to boot off of a uSD card. Then you can boot into that and see if it has the same issue. If it doesn't then it's an OS issue (at which point, a backup/re-flash may be called for). It's not likely, but it is possible...

One thing you may consider is TinySMB in the extras repository. It sets up an SMB share on your phone that you can access as a shared folder. Handy for PC transfers over LAN. Your speed limit is more likely going to be how fast your flash memory is, not the connection. If you have a class 8 or better, wifi may slow it down, but if you're using the in-phone memory, or under class 8, you shouldn't see speed issues because of wifi.

Also: If you haven't already, I advise you to use a dremel or a file to file down the teeth on the charger and your data cable on the uUSB side. I did that early on because they tended to get stuck, and am happy I did so. I have a Sept/Nov batch phone, and no port issues yet...