Can Your Phone Do This? How to Fix a USB Port That Won't Charge! By Paul's Hardware

Welcome back guys, today's video is a little different, because it's about cell phones, I, don't do cell phone videos very often, but the last time I did one was over three years ago, when I got my pixel XL I took it to Thailand. I did a review that video performed okay, but let me get to the point of today's video I'm talking about rehabilitating a phone that you've had for maybe a little too long, where the port just doesn't plug in the same way it used to. This is specifically for phones with USB type-c ports, but we're also going to give a micro port a try as well. The tool we're using for today's video is a simple toothpick, because I want this to be accessible to anyone, and before you proceed, you should be aware of a few things. One you're doing this at your own risk. There is a slight risk of damage to your phone, so make sure that your phone is backed up and ideally make sure it's fully charged as well, because on the off chance that you damage your type-c charging port, you will want to be able to pull things off of your phone or do any backups necessary, because that will prevent it from being charged yet in the future, and you'll probably have to get a new phone.

But if you're in a situation where you can't even really plug in a USB type-c cable to your phone to get it to charge anyway. Well, then, maybe you're already on the verge of doing that. Here's your test! If your type-c cable can't plug into your phone and do that, then you probably will want to do my cell phone type, C port cleaning method that I'm doing for the first time ever, and it's never been done before, and I'll get into the details of the how-to in just a moment. A brief anecdote, though- and this is because, like I said I, don't do videos on phones very often, but people sometimes ask me, because I do videos on computers all the time and I get part sense for me to show in the videos like Paul. If you didn't get all these parts sample to you and everything, how would you handle like any basic computer, build that you might do on your own? Apart from the whole tech YouTube thing, for that, I would say: look at how I treat my phones.

This is an original pixel XL, it's three years and three months or so old I'm still perfectly happy with it. I've repaired it and fixed the screen after I broke. If I have machinations in my mind that I want to open it up and replace the battery at some point if that starts not doing as well still holding up quite well, but even better. Now that I have the ability to fast charge once again, because again, I just cleaned out that type C port. Apart from this trick, not working because type-c ports do have little detects in them.

That sort of help it to stay, gripped into the slot and not pop out easily other symptoms of a clogged porch are that it might not charge fast, or it might just do slow charging, whereas before it did fast charging and then, if you ever plug your phone into a computer, for example, to copy stuff off of it or transfer stuff onto it, because people still do that right from time to time, you might just be completely unable to get a data connection going between your phone and your computer. Now the cost of that poor connection is actually pretty simple and straightforward, but you might not have thought about it or realized it, or maybe you're not like me, and you already know this, and you're like Paul. Of course that makes perfect sense. But a lot of us keep our cell phones in our pockets. Our pockets are full of lint dust and other detritus that might make its way into that porch.

And then, every time you go to charge your phone you're, taking a plug, and you're taking anything, that's in there, and you're just pushing it down and forcing it down further and further into the slot that builds up over time, and it just makes it so. The plug doesn't plug in all the way. Eventually, it will not be able to hit that little detect spot where it actually grabs on. So you can do that with it. Then eventually, it'll get backed out far enough, that you can only get basic charging functionality out of it and, of course you can use a basic technique like trying to just blow the dust out of there or anything.

But the fact is it's compressed it's pushed down, and that is why something like a toothpick is a good solution for digging that out now the toothpicks I have here been the round ones, and I would actually recommend trying to get a hold of some of those little squarish ones. That are a little thinner than this. If you're trying to get in between the center posts, that's in there and down to the base of the actual plug, bear in mind that your contact points are on that center post that sticks up. So that is what you'll want to be delicate with: try not to scrape up against it. Try not to push it to the side too much if you can avoid it.

A toothpick is a good tool for this, in my opinion, because it goes down to a little point at the end, and you can get that to sort of scrape along the trough at the bottom and, of course, they're they're, somewhat flexible, they're, somewhat malleable, so the toothpicks should ideally break before anything in your port actually does but again be careful while you're going through this process. Now the reason I'm doing this video at all is because I just did this to my phone about two weeks ago, and it made a night-and-day difference on the recent trip to CES actually being able to plug in and fast charge for a few minutes, while I was in between meetings and just overall giving me a bit more confidence that if I plugged my phone into charge, it was going to stay plugged in and charging until I wouldn't unplug myself. So that is why some of these attempts with my phone are probably not getting too much stuff out of there because, like I said, it was already cleaned out. That said, I've grabbed a couple. Other phones just to try to do a bit more work on this.

So I've got my wife's old, Nexus, 5, and I'll see how dirty that pork got, and then we have one more potential victim. This is Joe's phone, which is an older LG model, and it has a micro port on it, even though these are becoming slightly outdated. Still, a port that many phones use is actually a smaller gap on that. But Joe has been having these plug issues with his phone as well, so we're going to do our best see if we can clean that up too so, starting out here with my wife's old Nexus 5, which honestly doesn't have too much gunk down in the slot. So that's, okay! It still provides us a nice example of what to do, and here you can get a pretty clear look at that center post.

That goes across the middle. It has contact points on either side, so bear that in mind there on the top and the bottom. That's why it's a reversible port- and here you can also maybe tell that my toothpick is just barely fitting down in between this groove and that center post, and that is with the toothpick kind of shaved down a little. So that's why I was recommending those little square shaped toothpicks a little smaller and might to be able to get down in this groove a little more easily. That said, the general technique was to start on.

One end like this: get down to the bottom of the channel and just sort of push along the edge and see anything, that's gummed up or built up right. There push it along until you get started down here to this end and then lift it up and out and get it out of your type C port flip the phone over. If that helps give you a little better access to the other side. Just repeat this, and once you get a layer of gunk up, go back down because there might be more stuff caked down there. I had to do this three or four times with my phone before it actually got completely cleaned out.

That said, there's not a lot going on in this particular port. It is fairly clean. So, let's see if my phone needs some more help, here's the bottom of my phone- you can tell I carry this around in my pocket all the time, because, like look the speakers even have a layer of gunk on them, I'm going to clean this out and then maybe my sound will improve funny how certain things you don't notice until you point a macro lens at them, but I am just doing a light. Cleaning of my speaker's here also I want to be careful and not push down too much because their speakers right under these little thin, grates or fabric or whatever, that is in there. That's keeping the dust Ramon more to the point, though, there's my type seaport and, as you can see, it's pretty dusty and dirty in there, although it just doesn't have as much stuff caked in as it did when I first cleaned this out, which was a couple of weeks ago.

It's um once again, because this was cleaned fairly recently, and I'm, not getting a lot out of here. There was a little of maybe lint or whatever fibers, that kind of came out the edge, but you get the idea, try to butt up against the outside edge rather than that inner post try to start at one end and push your way along down to the other and then just feed stuff up and pull it out. Next up we're going to try a micro port on Joe's phone which promises to potentially have some actual crap in there, since the micro port is even smaller. I have basically done like a shard of the toothpick here, so I can hopefully get down in the nooks and crannies like smoke coming out yeah, so guys, that's pretty much inter-app it up for this quick little video on how I fixed my USB type-c port on my phone to make it more functional and more usable and hopefully extend the lifespan of a phone that I like a lot that has features that new phones have gotten rid of like a headphone jack, which I still use a lot. Yeah, I think the only thing that's going to make me switch from this phone is when the battery.

Finally, stops holding a charge reliably, but who knows maybe I'll crack it open and try to change the battery out at some point too, but I think that's a little beyond the scope of this video. If there's anything that I regret, it's that I didn't record when I actually clean my type C port out for the first time, because there was at least eight times the amount of gunk that came out of all three of these phones combined when I did that. So for any of you who are having that type of challenge with a USB type-c port on a phone I guarantee, this will help you out again just be careful. Take all the precautions I mentioned at the beginning of the video, and it probably makes a little more sense to attempt this procedure on an older phone that you're trying to extend the life of rather than a newer phone, which probably hasn't even had that much time to get all the gunk built up in the port. We did do one last sort of moment of truth test with Joe's phone here, plugging it in with the charger turned on, and it just starts charging.

That was an issue he was having before he'd have to plug it in and kinda wiggle it around or set it at just the right angle, in order to get it to charge. So because of that, I call this video, a success and I think it's now time to end it. So if you enjoyed it hit the thumbs up button, maybe leave me a comment in the comment section down below. Let me know if you attempted this technique on any of your phones and if it actually helped it charge, whereas before it was having a difficult time with that, thanks again for watching guys, and we'll see you in the next one.

Source : Paul's Hardware