Set Droid in media dock, set alarm, went to sleep... woke up to dead phone!

[ssnapier]

I just got this phone as an exchange about 2 weeks ago (cracked a screen on my first one). It is not a rebuild, it was a brand new phone right out of the box and I was quite happy with it until this morning.

I set this thing in the media dock and turned on Better Alarm (I have found the stock alarm clock to be unreliable) and went to sleep. This morning I woke up to a black screen which is normal, but I hit the button to wake it up and NOTHING!

I have pulled the battery, tried a hard restart, I even tried using a normal USB cable to re-charge it even though the battery was almost fully charged when I went to bed. None of this got any response from the phone.... uugh, so dang frustrating!

I guess I will be making a trip to the Verizon store today, but man this phone is starting to piss me off!

 

[ssnapier]

Holy crap, I had it sitting here still plugged into the USB cable on my laptop and it just turned on! Anyone else ever had a 20 minute delay when plugging the phone into a charging cable??

 

[tkuder]

Sounds like to me your phone is not an early riser. :blackdroid:

 

[jsh1120]

Many people have experienced occasional anomalies such as the one you report. It appears that they are more frequent when a phone is new and tend to disappear after awhile (or people stop reporting them.)

There doesn't appear to be a clear "fix," especially since the problem is only occasional. But here are some suggestions.

() Be absolutely sure that when you dock your droid the battery is actually charging. It's possible with both the stock dock and 3rd party docks for the droid to go into dock mode without actually being connected to the charger.

() Be suspicious of third party usb cables. Some won't charge well at all. Some fail relatively quickly. I use a third party cable for charging while docked and it works fine. But I also find that the cable that came with my phone charges the phone at about twice the rate of the third party cable.

() Use a wall outlet rather than a PC connection for charging. The latter is notorious for unreliable behavior, mainly because the power rating from your pc is typically much lower than from a wall outlet.

() Reboot your Droid once a day or so. Like most computers, the Droid tends to collect some unnoticed data fragments when it runs for awhile. A reboot tends to clean it up.

() Don't be too reliant on a battery monitor. They tend to get "confused" from time to time.

() Buy an extra battery. You can get an OEM battery for the Droid on Amazon.com for about $10-$15. Keep it charged and switch batteries every once in awhile. In general, batteries are more prone to failure (and odd behavior) than computers. If you experience a problem of almost any kind, it's useful to change the battery and to see if the problem is in your phone or in the power source. And with an extra battery and a standalone charger you can usually stay "up" indefinitely.