Wednesday, August 21, 2013

goodbye, my Droid?

Almost as if it understood that its time has passed, my Droid X finally appears to be dying. The smartphone has stood faithfully by me for three years, but now that I'm in Korea and the device has no more use (I can't simply switch out the SIM card and keep using the phone), it seems, at long last, to be giving up the ghost.

I noticed a problem just the other day: the USB charger cord no longer helps the phone to charge. (I charge my Droid, which is still useful to me because it contains so many photos, e-books, games, and exercise programs.) Where the cord attaches to the phone, things have become loose and unconnected, and no matter how much I jiggle and cajole the cord in the phone's socket, it's a greater and greater struggle for me to get the phone's display to read "Charging." I have no idea why this is happening now; perhaps a stopgap measure may be to buy a new, Korean version of that USB cord. But if the problem isn't the cord so much as the phone, then it won't matter how many new cords I buy: the phone simply won't charge, and all I'll be able to do is watch the battery die over the next day or so.

Perhaps on Friday, when I've got more money in the bank, I'll try taking the phone somewhere to see whether it can be diagnosed and, I hope, treated.


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2 comments:

Charles said...

Three years seems to be a pretty short lifespan... or is it not?

Kevin Kim said...

To me it is. But my brother David tells me that cell-phone lifespans used to be reckoned in one-year stretches. For what it's worth, my tough old LG phone, the one that my buddy Jang-woong got me around 2005, lasted until 2008 before it suffered a couple cascade failures and died.

I should note that, at least for the moment, I've figured out a way to trick my phone into charging. If I angle the cord in the socket a certain way, such that the metal contacts in plug and socket press more firmly against each other, charging happens. To keep the plug angled that way, I wind the cord around the phone, thus trapping the plug at that angle. Full charges are the result, with no crapping out at 70% charge.