Charging failure - please help!

Hi all

A couple of months ago, my Fairphone 5 developed charging problems - the main thing was that with some cables/adapters, the Fairphone would only charge slowly, and with others, not charge at all. All cables/adapters worked perfectly before.

The other, very odd, issue was that when plugged it, the device would not stay powered off. Shutting down the device, the phone would simply reboot. This issue has persisted throughout.

To head off any key questions:

  • Latest software
  • Various combinations of adapters/cables. These would charge my work phone and other devices no problem
  • Cleaned the port with specialist contact cleaner
  • Safe mode didn’t help
  • With recommended service test, “Current” reads “NOK” with a value of below zero. Clicking Fail does nothing
  • A couple of months before all this, I bought a brand new battery due to what I assumed was regular wear.

I contacted customer service. They were not helpful. The only proposed solution was a load of paperwork to return the phone, leaving me without my device for weeks and the loss of all my data. I decided to wait until I had a bit more time to deal with all of this.

Unfortunately, things have got worse. The slow charging/no charging happened more often. The fingerprint sensor failed (weird?). And this week, it started to show a “debris in port” error message whenever plugged in - but when I took the charger out, the message changed to “port now usable” (but the error message would return when plugged in). Nothing will charge it.

The device eventually lost all charge - before I was able to back the device up or transfer the data over - and now won’t power on at all.

Customer service hasn’t responded for over a week, despite multiple messages.

I’ll obviously have to return the device, but at this point, my priority is to try and recover the data.

Any ideas of what’s going on, how to boot the device for long enough to get the data, or some other way to recover the data?

Thanks so much for any help.

Hello and welcome to the community

The repair initiated via the self repair portal does not (at least in my case did not) require any additional contact with the support, and the main paperwork was printing the shipping label, invoice and additionally the RMA repair label. Have you purchased your device directly from the Fair phone?

If the phone is able to function on a battery, one way to save the data would be to borrow a battery locally (depending on where you are based you can perhaps look for a local angel). If the data is more important to you and you don’t have the option of borrowing a battery, you could even purchase a spare battery.

In terms of repair times, the travel takes most of the time, and unfortunately I cannot say what your experience be. I had smooth delivery to the UK but there was a user reporting issues.

Okay. If anyone in or near Manchester UK would be able to get in touch (does this forum support private messaging?) I’d be extremely grateful