Motorola Droid Not Charging With USB

[highball]

BestBuy has a Rocket Fish 18inch cable that has two different usb plugs (two differernt micro), one is for the Droid. It says 19.99, but they are charging 15.99 for it right now. I plug it into my laptop dock station and it works great.

Just thought I'd add one note since I purchased a similar Rocket Fish cable from BestBuy that I will now be returning. A sales rep told me what I purchased was both a "regular USB cable" and charging cable. It came with a USB mini cable, and a mini (female) to micro (male) adaptor. However when the USB mini cable is used together with the adapter it charges only and will not allow me to mount for data sync. Interestingly though, when I stuck the mini to micro adapter on a mini USB cable that I know works for data sync it worked fine. Looks like the rep was either misinformed or I got a bum cable (or she was being delibrately vauge with the whole "regular" usb thing).

 

[GrooveElements]

Not sure if you resolved your issue or not but same thing happened to me today and I figured it out. I too went to radio shack picked up a basic micro usb cable plugged into my usb and nothing. I tried every port on the computer still nothing. But, I knew it was doing something in my case because the white light where the mini portion of the usb plugs in was lighting up. So I plugged it in again but this time I waited. Surely enough after about 3-4 minutes it powered up and started to charge. So yes I think patience is key =)

 

[Pranilm]

I just recently switched to a droid. My previous phone was an iphone. I agree with most of the people in this thread that usb charging works and that its really slow. It does take patience since it took a 30 or seconds the first time i plugged it into usb.

I have an APC portable battery pack (APC Mobile Power Pack, 10Wh) for chargin usb devices. The output of the device is 5v 1.6A. With my iphone it used to charge my phone pretty fast over usb. It actually charged faster than the Apple supplied wall charger for the iphone. (Apple wall charger is rated at 1A). When i plug-in the droid to the same APC battery pack, using the motorola original micro usb supplied with the droid it charges really slow.

So my question (and i'm sure if it belongs in this thread or not) is: If the the droid acts like a USB spec device and only draws as much power as it has "permission" for, then why is the iphone different? Is it something on that can be changed on the phone side?

 

[pdotterw]

Motorola Droid USB Charging issues

I have had trouble charging the Moto Droid with some USBs AND especially with some Solar units that have a built in USB port such as the Powerfilm USB and AA battery charger.

I continued to try other solutions for remote charging (want to take the droid backpacking) - found a couple of solutions for remote charging that work with the droid.

First - this unit works fine (Powerflim 5 Watt Solar Folding Solar panels) with the Motorola CAR 12V adapter plugged into it :

http://www.gofastandlight.com/Powerfilm-5-Watt-Folding-Solar-Power-Panel/productinfo/PO-P-F15300N/
　
Second - a Hand Crank on this radio powers it . Takes a long time - lots of cranking - but does provide power and is a weather radio and flashlight to boot

http://www.gofastandlight.com/Grundig-Eton-FR160-Microlink-Radio-Solar-Crank-AM-FM-Weather-Emergency-Surival-Radio/productinfo/E-P-H551/

Hope that helps define options that work and those that do not.

 

[scbond]

I had this happening on my first Droid/Milestone but didn't have time to check it out as the phone had to be returned for another reason. Just got the new one and I was getting the same problem and it seems it's hugely common.

I did some digging and it turns out that the reason the phone is not mounted or charging is because the phone does not recognise the USB cable being plugged in. Why? Well, task killing applications from the Android Market kill processes on the phone, usually every single one apart from the task managing application itself. One of the processes is a system process called 'USB'.

When you kill the USB process it stops any USB activity from working as the phone doesn't have the ability to recognise the cable. To fix it, just restart the phone so that all the start-up processes run again. Then, go into your task killer and add the USB process to the ignore list that most, if not all of them, have as a feature. If yours doesn't then I highly recommend Task Killer. It has a free or paid version, the only difference as of very recently is that the free version has adverts.

 

[HX9X]

Thanks scbond, I took your advice, and it's now charging!

 

[amber013188]

I've been having the problem of my droid powering down when I plug it into my wall charger. Does anyone have any ideas of why this is happening? I thought maybe it wasthe auto update of 2.2, so I did a factory reset back to 2.1. However, nothing changed. Additional; info I'm running on SSnewest rom.

 

[djonathang]

I was having the same problem. After reading the posts on this topic, I grabbed a different micro USB cable that I was using in my car (and having no problems there). It worked at my PC.

Strange but effective.

DG