Hey everybody, those who know me or have read my posts know that I almost always defend Fairphone because I love their mission and love being involved in the movement.
However, at the moment I’m a bit lost at what to think. Two weeks ago I took my FP1 First Edition to Handywerk.at (List of repair shops) because the USB connector was beginning to get loose. They said that I can get it back the following day, but I did not go go pick it up until the second day. When I got there they said that they were trying to contact me because they ran into troubles with soldering a new USB connector into my FP1.
The guy at the repair shop told me that when he opened up my Fairphone the USB connector jumped out of the phone towards him. Apparently it had been already worn out badly. He then said that they couldn’t fix it as quickly as they intended to because the whole USB connector was broken out from the motherboard. Thus they weren’t able to attach a new generic USB connector, but would have to use the old connector and try to fix the soldering joints.
He showed me the motherboard and explained to me that it looked as if the factory workers had tinkered with the board. He said that probably they also had had problems soldering the USB connector to the motherboard because the space on there is actually too small to do it properly. To me it seemed as if they had used glue on the motherboard… Nevertheless they did their best and I then picked up my FP1 after the weekend.
At first everything seemed to work ok, but soon after, when I had arrived home and tried to plug in my phone to a wall charger, the FP1 had connection problems again and stopped charging when I moved the USB cable to a certain direction. So the situation now is that I have a damaged USB connector that can probably not be fixed (The guy at handy-werk.at said that no FP1-user has had to make use of the 1-year-warranty yet, meaning that all other FP1 USB connectors could be fixed).
I see these options now:
- Take the FP1 to the repair shop again and hope for the best or
- take part in Fairphone’s buy-back program.
Buying a motherboard as a spare part is not possible because they are out of stock and I guess they will never be produced again.
I’m quite disillusioned now (after hoping to use my FP1 for 4 years) and don’t really know what to do. Somehow I would like to blame someone for this mess. No other phone I have had had had problems with the USB connector. Does anyone have any advice for me?