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Comment by meuk | Hacker News Reader

Broken mini USB connectors are a pet peeve of mine. I literaly threw away my last three phones for the single reason the mini USB port wouldn't hold on to any cable anymore.

This doesn't bother most other people, but I like to use my phone for longer than 2-3 years. I really don't see the point in buying a marginally faster phone every other year. It's wasteful for the environment and costs a lot of money.

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I've found that often it's pocket fluff at the bottom of the connector on phones. I've used a needle (something made of plastic would be better) to get rid of it and the connector then can hold the cable in place.

Oh, wow! Thank you so much. I was about to take my phone for repairs because of what I thought to be a flaky micro-USB port.

A fair amount of phones the charging port as a modular component or on a replaceable charging board. Makes fixing this issue cheap/easy

Mini or micro? I don't remember phones with mini-USB ports.

Some early Windows Mobile-powered HTC devices did.

My original Motorola Razr had a mini USB port.

Micro-USB was only introduced in 2007, and was uncommon before 2010 or so. Before it was available, most phones either used mini-USB or proprietary connectors.

HTC Hero and many other phones from that era had a mini-USB port.

I'm not sure how you would use them for 2-3 years even if the charger was still good, my phones' batteries have always become too low capacity and unpredictable at the one year mark and I don't see replaceable batteries anymore.

you had 3 mini USB phones?

Are you sure that's the connector you mean? Most phones started using micro-USB around 2010.

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