Tuesday, August 14, 2012

Reviving the kobo touch

A couple of weeks ago my wife's kobo touch decided to die. Actually I think this happened because she didn't use it for a while. I took it to load some books, connected it to the PC, loaded the books and when I pulled it out it froze on the "Connected and charging" screen. I started roaming the forums to try and find a solution for this: first I left it to charge on the usb port, then I tried with a wall charger (bought for the kobo from fnac). I left it for over 12 hours with no result. When trying to start it the led flickered blue briefly (under a second if not plugged in) and did nothing after that. When connected to the computer or to the wall charger the led was green (charging) for about 10 seconds, went blue (assume trying to start) for about 5 seconds but didn't start. It went on doing this indefinitely. I did try to perform a factory reset using both methods: keep menu button pressed while powering on or keeping the back reset button pressed while powering on. This achieved nothing. The led just briefly flickered red twice. Following some advice on the forums I took off the back cover and disconnected the battery. Same story after connecting again so I thought there might be something wrong with the device. I opened up my own (working) device and connected the battery to the dead one. It started up immediately. I gave it up for a dead battery and thought I'd talk to a fried about finding a replacement and went on holiday. If you are interested in how the kobo came back from the dead please read on. As luck has it I didn't take my phone charger with me (it has the same type of connecter as the kobo) as I had the kobo wall charger and thought I'd use that. On the first day my phone battery died so I plugged it into the kobo charger but, surprise, it just stood there. I tried all the plugs in the room but with no success. Finally I just took the cable from the charger and asked the lady at the reception desk to plug the phone into their PC which worked and my phone returned to life. This got me thinking so when I got home I plugged the dead kobo touch into my phone charger, left it for about an hour. This time the green led stayed on all the time (no blue light). After an hour I tried to switch it on: the led wen from green to blue for about 5 seconds and then back to green. I was about to throw it at the wall in frustration when the screen turned white and the device powered up. My assumption is that the battery was fully depleted and, for some reason, the device tries to switch on even when connected to the wall charger (either this or the charger doesn't provide enough power) which drains the battery again so it never has enough time to store the power needed for startup. This is probably an engineering flaw as I don't see the point of trying to start the device when there isn't enough power. It should probably only try to connect to the PC when the device is actually turned on. So, before sending your touch back to kobo try a different charger. I used a samsung phone charger. Hope this helps someone. I'll keep it for future reference just in case...