Sunday, February 11, 2007

Utility to charge a RAZR from an OS X machine

The world's worst phone became a little less crummy today. Scott Gruby, an experienced Mac developer, has a utility that will allow an OS X machine to charge the phone:
Scott Gruby’s Blog :: Charging a Motorola RAZR over USB

The Motorola RAZR has a mini USB plug on it for charging and hooking to a computer which is great as I have lots of those cables lying around. Unfortunately it won’t charge over USB from a Mac out of the box. Luckily, I know some tricks and someone told me the magic to get it to charge. I whipped up a little program that tells the RAZR (or any other Motorola cell phone) to charge over USB....

... The app is pretty simple; place it in your applications folder, launch it and set it as a login item. Whenever you plug in your phone, it should start charging. If your machine goes to sleep, it will stop charging. (For those curious, all the program does is open and close the USB interface on the phone.)
Easy to install, easy to uninstall. I'll definitely try it. Scott asks that, in return, we take a look at his receipt management software. I'll give that one a try too.

BTW, this app is not easy to find! Scott published it in November 2006, but I couldn't find it on versiontracker. I only know about it because Scott mentioned it in a comment on a post of mine. Scott's blog is also an underappreciated gem, I've added it to my bloglines collection.

Update 2/7/07: Nina Love (see comments) was able to charge her RAZR from her MacBook apparently without installing this utility.

3 comments:

  1. I lost my charger for my Razr and this week I'm broke beyond belief, so I was very upset. While tearing the house apart for the millionth time, I noticed that my mother's cord that plugs her camera into usb on her computer would also fit my phone. So, I was like, maybe it'll charge if I plug it into my macbook. And guess what? It does. Right out of the box. I have an intel core processor, in a white macbook and the razr is about 4 months old, bought through t-mobile in Georgia, USA. I'm happy. God loves me.

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  2. I think Nina is saying that her MacBook charged the RAZR without installating the charger utility? It didn't work for me, I wonder if the RAZR charging behavior varies between different iterations of the phone.

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  3. Great! Thanks so much.
    Marie

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