Bricked from charging? Won't turn on

TLDR: I received my phone new, and 24 hours later I placed it on charge, right beside me at my desk. It overheated while charging, in under an hour, and now it will not power on or charge. So, I bought a brand new phone and 24 hours after receiving it, I now have no phone. And from reading here, support seems quite unresponsive. This seems pretty dismal.

More detailed version:

After my first 24 hours with the Fairphone 6, including numerous app installs etc, the battery had dropped down to about 20% so I plugged it in to charge.

I placed it beside me on my desk, near my mouse, charging while I worked. I noticed that it reached about 50% battery fairly quickly, and I was impressed at the charging speed. A little while later (I think less than an hour after I plugged it in), I picked it up to check on it and I found that it was extremely hot, and that it had powered itself off / it was unresponsive.

I unplugged it immediately, tried turning it on with no luck, and then I tried to cool it down - It was extremely hot, almost too hot to hold. I first placed it beside an open window for the air flow to cool it down, and then soon after that when it had not begun to cool down, I placed it in a watertight container surrounded by ice cubes. The heat seemed to emanate from up near the camera cluster. Even in the ice, checking on it often, it still emanated a lot of heat and did not seem to be cooling down. It was like it was still generating heat somehow.

After some time with the ice, and regularly checking on the phone, it had cooled down. The watertight container was effective and the phone was dry. It would still not turn on. After a little while, I tried plugging it into the charger again, and soon the heat began to build in the same location near the camera cluster. But no power-up possible. I unplugged it from the charger.

Since then, it will now not even generate that heat when it is plugged in, so there are no signs of life at all now. After logging a support ticket, later on yesterday evening I tried removing the battery, holding the power button down, and then re-attaching the battery. However there was no change following this, and it still will not power on, or give any indication of life.

It’s frustrating, since the phone was delivered, new, 24 hours previously, and then it was placed on charge, on a desk. All really normal stuff. And now it seems to be broken and I have no phone, and from what I am reading, support can be difficult to reach.

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First off, this is a clear cut service issue. The item might have been defective from the jump after so little time.

It might not have been a good idea to expose it to icy temperatures, since the temperature difference is enough to harm the material severely. I get that you tried to control the temperature, but it would have been better to disconnect the battery and let it cool down gently on it’s own.

I figure the hot/cold event might have irreparably damaged the chips and there is nothing we can do.

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Wow OK, good to know, thanks. I didn’t realise that the temperature shift could be dangerous, just figured the heat was dangerous and should be controlled.

Yes, still I’d recommend the support chat in your case. It will open on Monday at 10am. It’s hopefully speeding things up for you.

True, that used to be like that for quite a while, but going to the launch of FP6 they said they have staffed up their support team - they know that with a new device that’s required (it was required before that already, but that’s a different story).

I just wanted to update this, since it is resolved now.

As advised by the customer support team, I returned my phone to the official, designated repair centre. After the repair centre completed their assessment, I received a new replacement device.

New device is working perfectly, no issues at all. Very happy with it.

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