The same thing just happened to me a half hour ago.
Context
It’s really annoying because I’m going to work away from home today during all the holidays and I depend on the mobile phone because I’m an event organizer and there are a lot of older people who only have my contact in case they have any problems on a trip we’re about to start. And I have to coordinate everything from there. I really need my smartphone!
This problem happened to me 20 minutes before I left home to take the bus to go to the city from where we are leaving. I have lost the bus trying to fix the problem, but fortunately, I have my own car and I will have to go in it because of this problem (with the environmental and economic implications and the risk of leaving it parked in the same place for almost a month without moving it).
I’ve tried several forced restarts and it seemed to start, but it would get stuck in the Fairphone logo, or it would show the PIN entry screen and then get blocked, ending up showing the coloured pixel grid in the image. I finally unscrewed the display module and screwed it back on - now I turned it on and it works, but I don’t know how low will it lasts.
Luckily I have a very basic old mobile phone that still works, and an adapter for the SIM card that my sister happened to have. I’ll take it just in case. Again: I depend on chance or luck to have another mobile that works at home and a SIM adapter.
I am very sad to find out that the Fairphone 3 is not reliable, I will not be able to recommend it to anyone for whom the reliability of their mobile phone is important. I had had other audio problems (microphone and speaker not working randomly after connecting a headset) with my FP3, but they were solved by rebooting it. This problem is too serious to ignore 