Fairphone 2 does not boot any more - battery broken?

I’m experiencing a problem with my Fairphone 2 that seems to be related to the battery.

A few days ago, the phone was completely dead in the morning although I had put it on the charger over night. I also did not manage to turn the phone on. After some googling, it seemed like the battery was deeply discharged. So I followed the manual on Fairphone’s website to “kickstart” the battery (removing it for 1 h, then charging it for a few hours). However, this did not resolve the issue at all.

While charging, the phone’s led first flashes red and after a few minutes (maybe 2-3) it is constantly red. Then some more minutes later (20-30) the device seems to try to boot up, and the Fairphone logo appears on the screen. At the same time the led is off. Just after the blue banner-thingy starts pulsing over the screen, the screen goes black again, the led starts flashing red, and the cycle starts over.

To me, it seems like the phone gets just enough power to start booting and then during the start-up it stops charging for whatever reason, draining the little bit of power that has gone into the battery. If this is the case, is there any way to prevent the phone from booting while charging or to charge the battery outside the device?

I also tried to boot the phone without the battery (but the charger attached). Then it seems to start the booting process and stops after a few seconds, which apparently is a normal behaviour. That tells me that the rest of the hardware is probably mostly fine. Is there any other way to figure out if the problem is actually the battery or something else?

Or what else could be done?

I’m not sure if this is related but already the day before this started, I had noticed some strange behaviour, namely that the phone randomly rebooted. I manually turned it off and on which seemed to resolve the issue so I did not bother about it again.

I’d be happy about any help.

It’s usual for the phone in normal charging operation to boot up until the Fairphone logo appears and then switch to the blue battery gauge which should display the “charge” level of the battery. This is the least default boot level just for charging.

Yes, there are generic battery chargers for different phone batteries.

In normal operation without battery but connected to a charger it should act in a loop permanently restarting the phone after showing the Fairphone logo.

If not done so yet, feel free to read more about battery issues here.

You could look out for one of our fairphoneangels in your area to swap batteries/phones for testing.

This could be related to a too loose battery compartment not properly contacting the battery. Please read more about this in the above mentioned batteryguide.

Feel free to use the search function here as well. There is plenty of valuable information to find about the FP2.

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