Recently, I received a Sharper Image CG-C140 Portable Folding Charging Valet which came with an adapter to use for charging my iPhone.
The first time I plugged my iPhone in, I could hear what sounded to be a high pitched electrical noise coming from the station. As I left my phone to charge overnight, I woke up the next day to find the battery was drained. I thought maybe I didn’t have it connected securely, so I plugged it in to the iPhone wall charger later that day. A few days later, I put the phone on the charging valet again and woke up to a completely drained battery. I know that it had “chirped” indicating that it was plugged in to a charger before I sat it down.
This time, things were different. As I mumbled about this piece of junk not working, I plugged the iPhone wall charger into the iPhone and pressed the power button. My phone wasn’t booting up. Ok, I’ll give it a few minutes and come back. Still nothing. I unplugged the charger cable and reconnected it, and there were no “chirps” or sign of life. I decided that maybe this valet fried my battery, so I headed to the nearest AT&T store. On the way to the store, I had my phone plugged into a car charger, and it wasn’t working either. [more]
AT&T said, you can buy another phone in the mean time, and we can send the phone to Apple for repairs. It’ll take a few weeks to get it back, and I need my phone for work. This brought up the obvious question, “Do I return the extra phone when I get mine back?” No, I would then own TWO iPhones. What!? Ok, I’m heading to the Apple store in the mall a few miles up the road. By now you can probably guess my opinion of AT&T.
Upon arriving to the Apple store, they told me that I would have to talk to someone in the technology “bar”. Yes, they have some kind of cool tech bar. Oh, and the wait time was about 3 hours. I thought Apple products were supposed to be trouble free according to all of the television commercials. Obviously, people have a lot of problems they need help with.
In the mean time, I used one of their Macs to search for similar weird charging issues. One post I came across said that their phone’s charging function had been “stuck” in a state that it wouldn’t do anything. Some lucky person had discovered that if they had their phone plugged into their PC through the USB charging cable, they could send a “jolt” to the phone that made it start charging again by shutting down the PC and then the PC back on.
Well, where I am now, all I have available is a car charger cable. I got back in the car, started the engine, plugged in the car charger cable to the phone, turned off the car, turned on the car, and shortly after, my phone was able to be turned on and charged. Two months later, I haven’t had any other problems with my iPhone battery.