EricaJoy

Spiffeeds and bad gadget design.

For some reason, Blogger lacks the ability to pop in an RSS feed somewhere and have it easily displayed on your blog via some tag. Not to worry, I installed feed2js which is working quite nicely. I modified it a bit to get spiffy corners to work on the feed titles.

Anyhow, I have a bone to pick with Cingular and any other cellular provider that sells the HTC Wizard, better known as the Cingular 8125 or the T-Mobile MDA. There should be a big red sticker on the box of every one of these that says “DO NOT LET YOUR BATTERY RUN ALL THE WAY DOWN.”

I’m getting a bit ahead of myself, lets go back to the day before yesterday. How to describe my reaction when my brand-new almost unaffordable phone wouldn’t turn on? Lets say there were a lot of words that I won’t post in my blog flying around. Before you ask, yes I let it charge overnight, yes I reseated both the battery and the SIM card, yes I did all the troubleshooting step I could possibly do to get it to work. I’d given up the ghost, resigning myself to calling Cingular to go through the hassle of getting a replacement. I decided to do one last search and came up with this thread on xda-developers.com and the post that saved my sanity:

“I had the same problem some weeks ago. If the battery go down to much and Wizard switch off then you have big problems because this ppc charge only when OS is loaded!

So if you are not able to switch on to charge it you have to charge the battery outside the phone.

This problem happen to me when i was traveling and i forget my charger at home… I bought another USB cable i cut it to take out the red and black wires, then i take out the battery from the Wizard and put red wire on the pin with label (+) and black wire to the pin (-), the pin label are written on the battery. I put attention to don’t make shortcuts and that wires and pin was touching and let 15 minutes to charge (natually the USB was attached to my laptop). Then disconnected USB cable from laptop, put the battery on Wizard and switched on it pressing the power button few seconds. It booted up and when OS was loaded i connected the normal USB cable to the phone to finish to charge it.

Now i charge the battery before that reach 0%!”

Yes. If I let my battery completely drain, I better have a USB cord handy that I can do some quick wirestripping on. Luckily, I happen to work in an environment that has them laying around all over the place and I got my 8125 up and running. HOWEVER. Cingular, T-Mobile? Bad form. Simply terrible. Please provide some method for charging the batteries without the OS running? Thanks.