hey guys,im 4 + days into my production unit having no charging ability:

i been using my n810 to charge my batt daily:


i cant wait 4+ weeks without my baby
ordered a few more batteries


question: can i do a firmware upgrade from the device itself or do i have to use the cable

Perhaps the most outrageous thing is having to wait 4+ weeks to get it fixed, when a trivial motherboard replacement and flash copy is all it takes. There isn't even anything to diagnose.

My guess is that the solder lands (=solder mask openings) on the board were checked and maximised in size to allow larger solder contact for better strength. At the same time stencil (=template that is used to apply solder paste to board) openings were widened to allow more solder paste. At extreme cases a "step stencil" could be used to allow even more solder paste in certain locations.

The only other alternative would have been to change the mounting method to through hole connector. All evidence point that this is not the case.

Needless to say that I'm also extremely careful when plugging and removing the charger cable...

Thankjs Mara. My concern is that in my case, the pads actually came (partially) loose from the PCB. No amount of solder in the world is gonna prevent that.

I forgot about you mentioning that.

To add into my earlier guess, maybe the first design was made with "minimum copper pads" that the connector required. Maybe the improved design had all the board empty areas filled with copper. (Basically flood it with copper and etch away just the bare minimum.) This should should to make it stronger against ripping of pads and tracks.

I guess these are all guesses until someone has board pictures of both earlier prototypes and final hardware.

that is very good question, if possible that would be good but i think we still would have problems if some software bricked n900 and we had to recover it with flash that clearly would only work via usb

I have the exact same problem now, the connector just came straight out when i removed the charging cable this weekend. I did not put any heavy force on the cable and hadn't noticed any problems before except when i just got the phone (mid december) it did sometimes have trouble starting to charge. After getting a new car charger this problem seemed to have went away...

I got two pictures of the end result if someone's interested (higher res. available on request )

mellie if you can please post your pictures, tia

So has any1 found a solution for this ?

Uhmm.. i did post the pictures (but no hires versions!) but it seems my host is down. Will try and put them somewhere else and repost 'm..

I see i can upload pictures here.. did add them to the original post!