Motorola KRZR K1 troubles and solutions

I used to have a motorola U9 rokr phone. I liked that phone because it was small, and had a usb charger interface, and subsequently, when people started texting me, I discovered that it's text prediction interface, and texting were good.

Unfortunately I dropped and broke that phone and I couldn't find a new U9 anywhere.

So, I picked up the Motorola KRZR K1 because it seemed to be a similar small phone, and hoped it would be easy to use based on knowing the U9 interface.

All of that turned out to be true.

One huge problem though, the Motorola KRZR K1 will not charge the battery with the supplied motorola usb charger. You plug it in, it looks like it's charging, but then when you unplug it later the battery meter hasn't moved. I even tried charging overnight with the same result. Both my original KRZR, and the replacement KRZR were new phones (not refurbs), they were unlocked (I use mine on AT&T), and they appear to have originated somewhere in Germany (or Netherlands) as the default phonebook contacts categories being in German. By the way, I could delete all of these categories except for the Allgemein category which cannot be deleted by any means I could determine, and has the unfortunate property of being the default category unless you actively reassign a contact to one of your other categories (you can make any that you'd like).

Anyhow, back to the battery charging issue...

I returned the new phone, and got another new one (with new charger, battery, etc) and the new one wouldn't charge either. This time it went completely dead. I tried a generic usb charger made by a company called PowerUp (which I like because has nearly every charger fitting), but that charger wouldn't charge the phone.

Here's what DOES charge the Motorola KRZR K1 :

1. a T-mobile usb car charger that I bought a long time ago (even the I'm on AT&T, at the time T-mobile was the only local store selling usb car chargers)

2. my ASUS PC usb port running Windows Vista Home Premium which amazingly recognized the phone and automatically installed the drivers, after which, the phone can now charge on my usb port (many posts by other unfortunate people have stated that they couldn't get that to work)

I must say that normally, I wouldn't stand for such craziness just to get a phone to charge, but I like this phone a lot otherwise because it's a lot like my old phone, so it was worth it for me to try to get the thing to charge somehow.

Another small annoying discovery about the Motorola KRZR K1 (relative to the Motorola ROKR U9)... the voice dialing in the in the U9 ROKR was built in -> it had speech recognition that would read your contact list (regardless of whether they were stored on the phone or on the sim). In the Motorola KRZR K1, it is limited to the following:

- any contacts you want to voice dial must be copied to or stored on the phone contacts and not the sim card, you can duplicate the ones on your sim card by copying them, but they have to be stored to the phone (I think the reason is they need to store a voice recording to the contact)

- for any contact that you want to voice dial, you then have to record yourself saying their name and save it (Phonebook > Options > Manage Contacts > Voice Dial)

- when voice dialing, the KRZR K1 doesn't give any verbal feedback unless it guesses the name you said, in which case it plays back the name you recorded (my U9 used to say - "Did you say Home" - to which you could respond "yes", and it would dial home, or if a name wasn't recognized, it would tell you that verbally, and ask you to say the name again).

Anyhow, I hope this info proves helpful to someone...