How to diagnose a bad dock connector

My wife has an iPhone 4 in an otterbox. Since the case won't allow it to sit in the docking station we bought a dock extender like this one:



We noticed that even though the data (music) traveled through the extender fine, it often would not charge the phone. The other morning, when my wife woke up her phone was completely dead and wouldn't turn on.

We've tried different chargers, plugging it into the computer, hard resets, DFU mode, and anything else under the sun and the phone simply doesn't respond whatsoever. I'm beginning to think the dock extender screwed up the dock connector in the phone.

I'm about to buy a replacement dock connector on Amazon so I can replace the old one, but before I do is there a way to be certain that's the problem? Are there any other possibilities?

TIA!

It 'could' be the connector, then again it could be one of a dozen components. You could change the dock connector, same issue, change the battery, same issue, change the logic board, same issue etc etc

If connecting it to the mains using the charger and cable supplied (without the case on) and a hard reset doesn't work I'd suggest taking it to an Apple Store for diagnosis.

At least, one way or another, you'd know what was wrong. They by able to give you repair/replace options.

mrplow said:

It 'could' be the connector, then again it could be one of a dozen components. You could change the dock connector, same issue, change the battery, same issue, change the logic board, same issue etc etc

If connecting it to the mains using the charger and cable supplied (without the case on) and a hard reset doesn't work I'd suggest taking it to an Apple Store for diagnosis.

At least, one way or another, you'd know what was wrong. They by able to give you repair/replace options.

Click to expand...

Thank you. I should have mentioned I've already taken it to the genius bar. He said there was no visible damage to the dock connector (water damage, bent pins, etc.).

He also said he disconnected the battery and tried hooking it up to an alternate power source to no luck. When he said that I began to think maybe it wasn't the dock connector, but when I asked him specifically if that meant the problem is not the dock connector he said that could still be the issue. Since a dock connector is only $7 on Amazon I figured I could give it a go. If it doesn't work it's not a whole lot of money lost....and I'll get to have fun taking something apart!

I was going to suggest a phone restore and then wondered as to how you could do that if the phone would not turn on or charge. The last fix in the attached link below describes connecting the phone with the USB sync cable to your Mac and then entering DFU mode which you may not have tried.

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3033442?start=0&tstart=0

Problems with charging/syncing

Reading through the various comments on this topic and thinking about my own experience I detect a common thread. I have a Kensington 'digital FM transmitter for iPod'. When I connect it to my iPhone to play in the car a message comes up to say something along the lines of 'this device will not charge'. After using it I connected it to my iMac but it wouldn't sync. The battery had gone down to red later in the day so I connected it to the charger but it wouldn't charge. Fortunately I have a radio with an iPod dock and that recharged it. Syncing is once again working but I think that using the Kensington gadget may not be a good idea and this may also apply to other non-standard devices.

As my experience is not unique I am puzzled that Apple technical guys haven't found a fix for this problem to which the only other solution would seem to be the fairly drastic step of going to DFU mode.

On a previous occasion when I had problems syncing I ended up resetting and erasing all data. For Apple Mac users this is not a problem because syncing gives the user the option of restoring the iPhone to its previous state before breakdown. Not sure how this would be for Windows users though.