I hope this is where I have to put my comment to enter the contest.! I’ve enjoyed receiving RSS feeds from the site for some time, but haven’t interacted back until that charger was up for grabs!

My story about my dead mobile device happened 6 months ago as my wife was about to give birth to our first son. I told everyone I knew not to bother phoning and texting me to find out how the labour was going as I wouldn’t have time to personally respond to everyone. I directed them to a blog that I’d set up where I’d integrated some twitter widgets so I could tweet and post any pictures on the fly. Well my wife forgot her iPod when we went to the hospital so I let her listen to my the music on my phone to ease her through her labour pains. It helped and she was thankful I had music for her to get her mind off of everything.

Needless to say she was in labour for well over twelve hours well through the night and into the morning and I wasn’t able to provide live updates for everyone that was excited to hear about our new arrival. For the next one, I’ll make sure I bring a spare battery or use the new charger I’m going to win from this contest!

I don’t use my phone for much other than phone calls. So, I haven’t had problems with a dead battery in my phone from something malicious.
This summer I got a SE Walkman phone, so the potential is growing. I’ve listened to music on my phone a little here and there, but not to any drastic battery drainage.
I guess as I use it to listen to music more and more, the likelihood is increasing! So I guess my story has yet to have happened.

A couple of days ago, my train simply had not plans to move whatsoever. Although I always charge my phone at night, that night I had forgotten all about it. At the end I was home 2 hours later than I normally am, and no way to phone home!

(ps. yes, I am a registered user, have been for some time !)

I ALWAYS plug my phone in at night, just before my head hits the pillow. I did exactly that the night i was going to bed early, to be able to get up at O-dark-thirty for a trip to the airport to meet a client’s plane, using my client’s car. I set my SpoonAlarm, which worked perfectly and woke me at the set time. I splashed water on my face, jumped in my clothes and grabbed the phone. Somehow the charging cord never made contact and didn’t charge my phone AT ALL, which i didn’t discover until the low battery warning went off, just as my client called to say which gate he was at. Had we needed anymore conversations, I would have been highly embarrassed and inconvenienced. My car is equipped with everything I need (charging cords etc), but when forced into an unfamiliar environment or away from normal routines, it would be wonderful to have a portable option to save the day.

I’ve been registered at JAMM for a long, long time so I guess I’m not really the target audience. Won’t stop me entering a giveaway though

PDA charging nightmares were always worse with devices which don’t clearly indicate that they’re charging. My wife’s Palm Tungsten E is one such device. After you’ve plugged the thing in you need to actually turn it on and look for the on-screen indicator in the top status bar to find out whether it’s charging. Absurd!

Power was the driving force behind my last PDA move: I abandoned my HTC Wizard when it could no longer hold a charge for more than half a day of serious use. Moved to an Omnia but to be honest I really wish this could hold more juice too – still charge it whenever there’s an opportunity.

Hi Sue, first of all, I’d like to ask about the last PPCTECH contest. I’ve been chosen and still have no directions about it. Yes I’ve got your mail, but no answers yet.

Here is my story… I always have a backup battery for my gadgets, and I keep them always fully charged. So I had this trip, only four hours on a backseat of a car, and I thought I had 6 hours at least of power to watch two movies… I started the first one and, one hour latter, I got the low battery message warning… ok… I used it until the device shut down completely. Here I was at the most exciting part of the movie and the most boring part of the trip. Then I changed the battery and what! the other one was fully discharged… Then I spent more than four hours looking at the window a never changing desert landscape, and avoiding the stupid chit-chat of my company staff, of course. When I was back home I realized that the charger wasn’t correctly charging from the front USB ports of my desktop PC, the lights went on but not charging at all.

I know I can’t be alone here – but there have been several occasions in which I’ve stayed out late, passed out without plugging in my phone, and woken up with a dead phone and a busy day full of phone calls ahead

I was traveling and on the phone for a really long time. Battery was close to dead, but not dead. Later that night when I was getting the “battery is almost dead” message I just ignored it as I had a charger with me and would just let the phone (8125) charge overnight. Soon the battery was totally shot. I plugged in the charger………… nothing! Turned out that when you kill the battery you need the *factory* charger to get it going again; a travel charger will not do the trick. Now my factory charger is in my suitcase and my travel charger is at home

I always plug my phone in at night, but often times after a hard days use I find my battery totally drained. Of course this usually happens on my way home when I am supposed to call to find out what is going on for the night or where we need to be at for the kids.

Hi Sue and all,

three weeks ago I was on an hour drive to work, and a couple of days before that, my car speaker got broken, so I decided to use my BT headset.

It would have been smarted if I made sure beforehand that the BT headset was fully charged… ;P

Earlier this year I’d been on a “green” kick of sorts, changing out incandescent bulbs with fluorescent, unplugging appliances when not in use, and changing powerstrips from standard on/off varieties to ones where power only gets delivered when the PC is on. This was the case with my laptop. When my laptop was on, everything plugged into the strip was on, including my USB hub where I kept all my mobile devices plugged in to charge and/or sync as needed. Not too long ago, after a long day at work using my Fuze frequently, I came home late, plugged my phone into its USB cable to charge it up from it’s low 15% state, answered a few emails on my laptop, then shut the laptop down. In so doing, that cut off power to the entire power strip…and to my Fuze. Absentmindedly forgetting this, I went to bed thinking my phone would be ready for another long day of us. Next morning when I arrived at work, and as you might expect, the phone was not charged, leading to a day of scrambling to coordinate call with people that would have been calling my cell to call my work number early that morning. So, for the morning both my phone and I were tethered to my desk while the phone charged while hooked up to my desktop PC.
The real irony for me is that I have several smartphones at home I could have swapped my SIM out with had I paid attention and checked when I was getting ready for work.