Carl’s Blog

I’ve had a problem with my Motorola V551 for quite awhile. It was difficult to get it to charge. I don’t mean “to hold a charge” because it lasted for a couple days just fine. I mean that I couldn’t get it to charge. The charger wouldn’t make a good connection. The Motorola chargers aren’t like Nokias that actually plug in. They clip in near the curved edge. From the first time that I tried with the phone, I noticed that the charger didn’t quite clip in solidly and it would wiggle around. Then about a month ago I noticed that it would take some fiddling with the charger connection to get it to start charging. This progressively got worse until earlier this week it took me 10 to 15 minutes of playing with it until it would start charging. Today the problem came to a head and had to be solved.
During last night it ran out of batteries again, so I knew I would have some fun trying to make it charge this morning. Of course it wouldn’t charge like normal. I started moving the connector around all over for about 20 minutes to no avail. Then I got some isopropyl alcohol to try cleaning the connectors, with no results. Google searches had shown me that many people had similar problems over time with the V551. I decided to call Cingular to see if it was still under warranty and if there was any known solution. Then I found out that my normal landline phone was out of battery too! By this time I was notably irritated.

I decided to go down to a Cingular store with my phone (now completely dead) and my charger. After a few minutes the salesperson got to me. I explained the problem and he wanted to try one of their chargers. They don’t sell the V551 there, but they do sell the V557. The charger for the V557 worked perfectly. I also noticed that there was an audible snap when the charger clicked in. That wasn’t there when I used my normal charger. I asked the salesperson about it and let me compare the two chargers’ connectors. There was a slight difference in the design, evidently enough to make the new one work.

Luckily I got the phone less than one year ago and I was able to swap my old charger with the new one for no extra charge. I got home and was able to charge the phone with no problems. The new charger would have been $20 if I was to purchase it and I think it probably would have been worth it. I hope that this helps someone else with a similar problem.

This entry was posted on Saturday, February 18th, 2006 at 9:21 pm and is filed under Tech Support, Cellphone. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.