It was an HTC EVO 4G (non-&quot;LTE&quot;). Quite old at this point.<p>I can only surmise what actually happened. I was full-time wifi tethering for a month or two and the symptoms along the way seemed to point to this cause. The phone eventually stopped taking power at all, until I plugged it into a USB port instead of the OEM 1A charger. At which point I realized the higher current was the problem, and investigated the cable.<p>It actually felt like a really nice cable - very robust and strain-reliefy. But apparently that&#x27;s because the whole thing was mostly plastic and essentially headphone wires. Lesson learned!<p>If my theory is correct , it&#x27;s a pretty stupid design. But I feel like there&#x27;s probably many weird corner cases in consumer electronics that don&#x27;t matter because 99% of people won&#x27;t find them, and the ones that do won&#x27;t realize it&#x27;s a bug, and by the time anybody could put it together that specific model has been obsoleted anyway.