Samsung Galaxy S II (thinking its charging all the time)

I'd thought I'd share some information about this phone to stop people spending money on getting it fixed unnecessarily.

I was bought this phone by my wife on my 50th birthday in March of this year, and to be frank it's a brilliant phone, it has performed faultlessly since it was switched on for the first time.

However like most electrical things they do suffer from wear and tear, and although the phone has been looked after and has barely a blemish on it, it did fail on me.

Namely the usb charging port, initially I didn't think there was anything wrong with my phone other than the battery not lasting very long, so I downloaded battery saving apps etc thinking my battery was on it's way out, but they didn't show anything untoward.

So being an utter unashamed geek I decided to get to the bottom of it and rooted my phone to get into the internals and see what was going on.

I found out that a wakelock was keeping my phone from deep sleeping, a wakelock is basically a kernel mechanism for Android power management. When a thread holds a wakelock, the kernel will refrain from entering a low-power state.

Now the wakelock in question was "vbus_present" which basically means it thinks it's plugged into the charger/usb port.

So I cleaned out the usb port on the phone with a soft toothbrush, then proceeded to blow it out with compressed air, neither of these things worked.....

Eventually I decided to look at the port with a high magnification camera from where I work, it was pretty obvious the central spade connector was pushed down away from the position it should have been in.

So after removing the battery and power source and with the help of a small flat bladed screwdriver I gently lifted the central spade (it's VERY small) upwards towards the screen side, until it was central, not thinking for a minute that it would do anything because I thought the usb charger side would straighten the spade out when inserted, and at this stage I had already called Orange (EE) and Phones4U to find out how to return my beloved phone for repair. 

To my surprise the wakelock disappeared. A fluke I thought....no it wasn't it's been consistently fixed since this rather bizarre fix I stumbled across.

Just for information the USB charging unit in these phones is easily replaced by yourself for around £10 and you can get the part from here.

etradesupply

So don't be fooled into paying large amounts of money to get your phone fixed

it's 8 screws and the job is done... there are even video's online to show you how.