Battery Meter Red, Not Charging when plugged

You said you turned it off and on, but did you do a reboot.

Try a reboot (described below).
Think of it this way, the iPhone is more of a computer than a phone. It suffers from being a new OS and nobody can deny there are not bugs and memory leaks. The longer left running, the more things start to fail or slow down (I have had the iPhone since day one of original phone and I am just speaking from my experience). Thus I equate it to like when Windows95 came out...not sure of your age or if you remember those days...but back then it was a running joke of how many days you can keep Windows 95 running before you had to reboot. I am sorry to say but the iPhone is the same way right now (but getting better with a few hiccups back during the 2.0 release). So for me, I reboot daily when I leave in the morning and take it off the charger. By doing so I rarely see any lag or problems.

A reset/reboot is:

Go to Home Screen
Press and Hold Home Button
Keep holding and press and hold Lock Button
Keep holding Both
You will see Slide to Turn Off (Don't let go to slide, just keep holding)
The phone will turn off (in time, but screen will look like it has some white lines)
Keep Holding
When you see the Apple Logo, you can let go.

Turning off via the Slide to Turn off while good and fine to turn off, is more like the Sleep Mode on a computer. Thus any locked up issues in memory remain when you turn back on. A reboot as described is like doing a real Turn off and Turn On on a computer.

You may also wish to read this tread about reboots and odd application behavior.
http://discussions.apple.com/message.jspa?messageID=5851978#5851978

Ok I think I have an answer. This happened to me twice and both times, it resolved the same way.

CAUSE: Both times, this happened when I let the battery run down too much. I was playing a game or listening to music and ignored the low battery warnings thinking I could push it and eventually the iphone shut down. No problem, I thought. I can just plug it in and keep on going. But when I plug it in, the iphone won't charge ... like it normally does. I get the red battery meter and the plug and lightning symbol as previously described. The phone won't turn on. I tried resetting it several time - hard resets as well - with no response. Always to the screen with the red battery.

SOLUTION: What i did both time was to keep the phone plugged in for at least 4 hours and maybe even more. I noticed that the red battery symbol flashes when it is not plugged in but when it is plugged in - the red battery symbol does not flash. Even though the phone is non-responsive in every other way, it seems to recognize if it is plugged into a power source or not. So I kept it plugged in for several hours. By the way, the phone is totally unusable during this time.

After that time period - I did a hard reset and the phone booted up with the white apple symbol and I started recharging again - this time it took.

I did this TWICE so I think it will work in the future.

THEORY: I am not a computer person (I'm a gynecologist in real life) but I will try to explain this behavior as best as possible. I think when the battery runs down too low it shuts down. But it shuts down EVERYTHING! Even the software that charges up the battery - which is a bug that Apple needs to fix - but everything shuts down. So this may sound stupid but it seems that when it is shut down to this degree the phone does not know how to charge itself. That is why nothing works. The phone remains shut down. It does not reboot. It does not charge up. However, as noted above, the phone does seem to recognize when it is plugged in to a power source or not as indicated by the flashes on the red battery symbol. It flashes if it is not plugged in and it stops flashing when it is plugged.

Anyways, even though the phone does not know how to charge up, it is charging anyways - but only by a trickle. A microscopic trickle. And it takes a couple of hours via this trickle to charge up the phone to a certain level to be able to reboot. After the reboot - you have to charge up the battery again - but since the phone is now working, it knows how to charge itself up normally.

Again, this is an amateur theory but I can't explain this behavior any other way.

I am not a computer person (I'm a gynecologist in real life)

Too much information.






Others have reported that just leaving it on the charger over night will solve the problem. Still others have reported holding sleep and home till Apple symbol appears while plugged in will fix it. But every user encountering this says you just have to leave it on charge for a looooong time.

Message was edited by: icebike

I once had an iPod "classic" do this to me a long time ago. The battery was so far ran down that when I plugged it in, it tried to boot up immediately, and the process of booting itself up would drain the battery all the way down causing the cycle to repeat itself until enough of a charge had built up where it could finish booting and start charging. I reported this to Apple and they had no advice for me and they were also unaware of this problem at the time. It was a 30GB model.

mine just did the same thing while on vacation. From what I'm seeing here it looks like many of us are having this same problem.