Hi everyone, I have been the proud owner of a Fairphone 4 since 2022 and just made my fairphone community account for addressing this topic, in the hopes of gathering some knowledge in the future for other FP owners as well. I didn’t really find a topic about this, apologies if I missed one.
Two weeks ago, my phone got a bad case of water damage. After letting it dry for a 24h (not in rice though but taken apart as much as possible), it worked fine for about one more week, even though the screen, which was badly affected by the water, came loose from the small frame it was held in. I ordered a new screen, which came just in time as last week the screen suddenly went black. It lights up when i restart the phone, but after a few seconds, exactly at the moment when the phone vibrates, the backlight stops working. The phone itself is still functioning as observed when pointing a bright light in a dark environment at the screen. Conclusion, the backlight section of the phone is broken, as the new screen rules out any problems relate to the screen or connector. I opened up the motherboard and indeed noticed some corrosion in the WLED section as shown on the “FP4_Information-for-repairers-and-recyclers” document. I contacted fairphone about this, but received no answer (i’m also still waiting on a reply on a question about one of my fairbud batteries that burnt up; I asked this almost a mont ago). I also took it to a repair shop who last year were able to replace a backlight chip on my macbook, but they told me buying a second hand FP4 was probably much cheaper than making them repair it. Luckily I just located a FP4 in my city (Antwerp), so i’m probably going to switch to that one now and use the old one for spare parts. I was curious to hear if people have had similar experiences and what they did about it. Are there people who managed to replace the specific backlight section? Did Fairphone themselves do something about this? Are there other solutions?