Snacking with Adel

Finally, it is.

I got messed up with the charging devices for the ZTE MF60 MiFi device in my desire to not use the included wall charger and cable and instead use whatever’s already there.

I sorta scrobbled around and used a various alternative number of charging methods, from attaching it to my iMac using the mini USB cable that came with the Nexus 7 (that apparently didn’t work all that well – it actually used up power rather than charging it), to another cable that took a whole night to charge it, to the included wall wart and the Nexus cable (it charged the thing, but only partially – the MiFi died on me after only an hour), until I realized that it wasn’t working all that well, and that I better just use the included charger and cable after all. That, after two days of trying.

When I got the MiFi, I went to Starbucks first before going home, and I examined my new toy there. I charged it up using everything in the box while I dickered around the net on my iPhone’s signal, and after a couple of hours, it was fully charged. I went home, put in my SIM and ran it down that afternoon to condition the battery before charging it up fully again, and I didn’t bother to remove the charger and cable from the box anymore, instead looking to my other gear to do it. It ran down sometime in the evening, and I hooked it up to the iMac to charge. With the Nexus cable.

Waking up yesterday morning, I noticed it hadn’t charged at all, so I got out the wall wart (and stupidly left the cable in the box, and used the Nexus cable). It was still early then, and I thought I had enough time to charge it. A couple of hours, right? Little did I know it would only charge for about an hour’s worth of use, as I would later discover.

I tried again with the iMac/Nexus cable when I got home yesterday, which didn’t pan out. The old mini USB cable that I normally used to charge my stuff was working, although it was slower than molasses flowing down the wall on a cold day. So late last night I reluctantly dragged out the boxed cable and used that and the wall wart, and the damn thing was charged in no time.

I think it was the Nexus cable that screwed me. It’s the only common denominator in the whole business. I remember that the Nexus itself took forever to charge when I used its own cable; I think there’s something really wrong with the damn thing. Either that, or there really are USB cables not meant for charging stuff. Which I vaguely remember to be somehow true.

The MiFi has been going strong for three hours now, and the power indicator’s only halfway done. The Nexus and the iPhone have been connected all that time, and it looks good – it looks like it might even surpass the five hour rated limit of the thing.

That’s good. Meantime, it’s working just fine now.