iPhone 3GS Battery Problems - Read This Before You Replace It!

IPHONE 3GS DEAD BATTERY ISSUES - MY EXPERIENCE

This post is for the Apple folks out there who still own an iPhone 3GS (or 3G) device that has a battery that doesn't last. If your battery lasts for 10 minutes or so, and you are considering having it replaced, check out what I discovered before you push on.

I was contacted by a friend of mine one month ago. Her son had an iPhone 3GS in near-perfect condition, but with a battery that would not accept a charge. I immediately agreed that she needed to have the battery replaced.

We ordered a replacement iPhone 3GS battery from Amazon.com, and I jumped on the replacement project as soon as it came in. Taking out the old battery was no easy task. It involves gutting the entire iPhone, and forcibly un-gluing the old battery from the inside of the case.

I successfully installed the new battery, through much travail, replaced the components and put the case back together. I booted on the phone to a near-full charge, and called it a day. I thought I was done.

The day I told my friend to come get the phone, something told me to charge it up before she had arrived. I hooked up the phone to my OEM Apple iPhone charger, and whaddya know... it would not accept a charge!

I fumbled with the phone, rebooted it several times, and monkied with the cord. It was a work in futility. I finally realized that there was nothing wrong with the battery. The problem was in the connector port itself. Replacing the battery only gave the phone an extra few hours of life.

If you have an iPhone 3GS that doesn't seem to have a functional battery, make sure that the connector works. If you plug the phone up and you don't see the "charging" icon and hear the audible alert, you may have a bad connector. If that's the case, you can just about forget spending the money to fix your phone because it will not be worth the labor.

Hopefully you have a functioning connector, and your battery is truly no good. If this is the case, get a battery and find someone in your local town to gut your phone and replace the battery. It will cost you anywhere from $30 to $50 for the labor, plus the small cost of the replacement iPhone battery on Amazon.

Do you have a story about an iPhone 3GS battery replacement, or a faulty connector? Share it with us in the comments section! We'd love to hear about it!

Carlton Flowers
Apple iHacker