My lad (grrrrr) who never looks after anything, has managed to bork his^h^h^h the nokia 9500 he was given for Xmas. It's gone flat, and the charger jack plug feels very loose in the socket.
The charger charges another 9500 fine, so it's phone-side.
Presuming he's knackered the socket, has anyone any experience of repairing ? Spare parts aside, is it possible to replace it ?
In his (slight) defence, it really is the crappiest of crappy designs. I've lost count of how many Nokia charger plugs there have been over the years. Thank god we're going micro-USB now. One charger for my phone, the Mrs phone, plus my Kindle ....
Don't know the 9500 but Google for "replace screen nokia 9500" and you will probably find some detailed instructions and pictures on how to dismantle it.
Is it the really microscopic power connector? I had a few of these die, until I discovered what was going wrong. I keep my phone in my pocket. Dust gets into the charging socket, and when you plug in the charger, the dust gets push to the bottom of the hole. Over time, this builds up, and then the plug doesn't go in as far, and doesn't click home. Eventually, it won't make good enough contact to even charge and/or the plug drops out.
Having discovered this is what was going wrong, it was an easy matter to poke around the hole with a pin, and it was amazing how much dust came out of such a tiny hole.
Before doing this, I had taken the phone to bits and cleaned up the contacts on the charging block where they press on the circuit board, thinking this was the problem, but it made no difference of course. By searching on the web, I did find someone selling the charging blocks, but I never got around to ordering a new one. That would also have fixed my problem.
The 9500 is easy to strip if you're careful, the charging socket isn't soldered to the main board, and is available as a spare part from a few places. You may find the fault is just dirt on the connection fingers or in the socket, and a blast of switch cleaner may cure it without stripping the unit.
This:-
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this:-
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it. The guy in the video makes a real meal of it, though.
The hard bit to find is the outer case, which, on mine is suffering from being dropped too many times, and will not now stay together in my pocket.
If only that last were true. USB chargers are as variable as anything else. The one that charges my headphones for example won't charge my GPS or Kindle. The one that charges the GPS won't charge the Kindle. And so on.
There's a relatively new standard for USB chargers, which involve using resistors on the data lines to signal back to the appliance that it's connected to a charger which can supply more current than a regular USB interface can.
Hisory:
Originally, you could draw 100mA from a USB interface, unless the peripheral negotiated with the host, in which case it could be negotiated up to 500mA. This requires an intelligent controller though, and chargers don't have any such intelligence built in. Very few USB controllers actually police the current draw to enforce what's been negotiated, although there have been some which do. There are many peripherals/appliances which draw more than is allowed, without negotiating this with the host.
Some manufacturers went for proprietry solutions, and one which was used in some cases was to raise the voltage from 5.0V (with a max permitted 5.25V in the USB standard) to 5.5V, which signals to the appliance that it's plugged into a power supply rather than a USB data port. However, this was never part of the standard, and in theory, feeding 5.5V into some USB appliances could damage them (being above the max allowed in the spec), although very unlikely.
The EU pushed the mobile phone manufacturers for one type of charger, and as a result of that, the ability to supply higher current through a USB interface without negotiating it over the data lines was added to the USB spec. It's done by having resistors of specific values connected to the USB data lines in the charger.
Of course, at the moment there are still plenty of USB chargers and appliances which predate this new standard.
And by the time that the standard is being complied with by all the equipment in use, there'll be a new standard which won't be compatible, and so on for the foreseeable future.
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