[MCoupeInsanity]

Well, I shouldn't say "iPhone 5S" charging flakiness, if I had stopped to think about it, it was just as flaky with my 4. The Y-cable works fine for audio but tends to charge my smartphone extremely slowly or not at all.

Perusing the forums, I see the suggestion that this might be due to the long distance between the power source (in the trunk) and the USB port in the armest compartment, which could cause the power level to drop some.

The problem only got worse with the Lightning adapter I picked up for the new iPhone 5S... which pushed me to work on a solution.

I'm going to be using a CableJive Dockstubz+ to inject extra power pulled from a ReVolt c2 USB Car Charger plugged into the armrest's cigarette lighter/12V socket. The BMW Y-cable will plug into one side of the DockStubz+ and the Apple Lightning Adapter Cable will go from the other side to the phone.

The parts are ordered, and I have my fingers crossed that this will provide a better charging experience once it's all kludged together -- and hopefully won't blow my shiny new phone up . I'll take some photos and post my results here once it's done.

Anyone have experience with this?

[Dark_Knight_335]

Awww come on man... don't tell me this- I just ordered the god damn phone

[Blubaron79]

Mine has never really charged with the iPhone 4 and 5 lighting adapter. It will add like 2% every 30 minutes.

[CenCal X3M Comp]

You can get a USB Y Adapter and a low profile USB Belkin charger. Plug on end of the USB in the USB Port, the other in the Belkin USB Charger and the other end on the BMW Connector. It will charge your phone perfectly.

[Lifted07Duramax]

So hows the 5S camera versus the 5?

[MCoupeInsanity]

Originally Posted by Lifted07Duramax

So hows the 5S camera versus the 5?

I never had the 5, jumped straight from the 4, but the 5S is damn fast. Smooth and fast. Love it so far. As John Gruber said:

So, how fast is the iPhone 5S? I ran a few popular web browser benchmarks to see how the 5S compared to the iPhone 5. (I tested the 5C too, but as stated above, it performed almost identically to the 5, as expected.) The results (average of three runs, after a device reboot):

WebKit Sunspider 1.0.1: 1.8x faster (408 vs. 716, smaller is faster)
Google Octane 1.0: 1.9x faster (5,576 vs. 2,984, bigger is faster)
Mozilla Kraken 1.1: 2.4x faster (5,948 vs. 13,937, smaller is faster)

To put that in context, the iPhone 5S beats my 2008 15-inch MacBook Pro by a small measure in the Sunspider benchmark (with the MacBook Pro running the latest Safari 6.1 beta). The iPhone 5S is, in some measures, computationally superior to the top-of-the-line MacBook Pro from just five years ago. In your fucking pocket.

[MCoupeInsanity]

Originally Posted by Dark_Knight_335

Awww come on man... don't tell me this- I just ordered the god damn phone

As I mentioned, it's not the 5/5S, it's an issue with the BMW not really providing enough juice to reliably charge any device. It will charge enough to keep your handset alive when it's nearly dead, but if you're above 50% it's going to trickle charge VERY slowly. Hence the DockStubz+ and 12V --> USB charger to inject more power into the loop.

Also... you have a 2011. If you have a new enough build (and you might) you have the combox and you can just plug straight in to the USB port without the Y-cable, and you'll be good to go.

[Dark_Knight_335]

Oh ok brother- well I just snapped up a combox snap-in adapter off eBay, so we shall see! I miss my Pandora

[cloakster]

The car's USB port was designed for iPods, which usually only need chargers that can do 5V, 0.5A. Most newer smartphones need at least 1A or more to charge properly. A DIY option like the OP is trying is pretty much the only way around this.