A Leslie Wong Blog

We bought a Samsung USB data cable from Verizon – the rep at the store said it was difficult to get. I thought we could charge our Verizon SCH-i730 with our Minty Boost USB charger. It’s wasn’t that simple.

For some reason, Samsung decided to add another plug in the middle of the cable – so you could plug in your charger! If you wanted to charge your phone while it was plugged into a USB port, you needed the charger. I thought the USB cable was supposed to obviate the need of a charger but Samsung must have a different idea.

I called Verizon tech support and they said that the Verizon stores didn’t even sell the cable. They didn’t tell me much.

After opening up the box in the middle of the cable, I traced the +5v from one end to the other. It was obvious that soldering a jumper would enable +5v to charge the phone.

Once the jumper cable was in, I reassembled the connector in the middle of the cable and plugged it into the phone. The phone icon changed to the charging icon meaning that it was being charged by the Minty Boost.

I looked on eBay, and found there were cables that didn’t need this mod for about 75% less than what we paid for this supposedly difficult to get (according to the Verizon rep at the store) cable.

At least it works.

To get your own Minty Boost charger, that works with iPods, Sony PSP, Nintendo DS/GameBoy Advance, Blackberry and a lot of other devices, go to Adafruit Industries. For a technical overview of the charger, go to ladyada.net.