Hi,
i have a problem with my Fairphone 3. It doesn’t want to charge up again in the normal way. The only way I can charge my phone is by putting it in fastboot or recovery mode. In rare occasions it does work with the charging but only after I turned it off and on again a few of times and i can’t find a pattern to when it works and when its not, but most of the time it doesn’t.
When I turn the phone off and plug it in it always reboots shows a battery but the battery is not filling up like its normally shown. Then it shuts down again and reboots. Whats also weird is that the LED shines yellow, red or green once I plug the phone but the battery symbol won’t say its charging and the percentage is not going up either.
This has been going on for about three weeks. I was hoping the issue would be resolved once I installed an update but sadly that didn’t change a thing. I am thinking of reinstalling /e/ but I’m hoping to get around it because of all my data and the time it would take.
If anyone of you has some ideas what I could do or whats going wrong on my phone, I would be grateful for help.
Thanks for your quick reply. I installed /e/ myself and it was working properly for about three month but since three weeks ago it doesn’t anymore. The change didn’t happen with an update it just came randomly up one day.
And I’m not using a specific charger. I tried quite a few charger and cables but it doesn’t seem to make a difference which one I’m using. It wont work with any of them properly. But the work on other phones. So they don’t seem broken to me.
So the issue didn’t came just after you installed /e/.
The Fairphone 3 is a complicated phone when it comes to compatibility with cables and power adapters. Have you changed them ? If you are still using the ones you were using at the time everything was working, then I don’t know.
If you don’t find any solution, I suggest you to re-install FairphoneOS, try if it works, and re-install /e/. (or try to reset /e/ first)
Hi hibenni. Since today I have the same issue. My FP3 does not charge anymore. It shows some reaction when I plug`in the cable: when on, red status light starts shining constantly, and when turned off it vibrates once I plug in the cable - but no charging progress.
Hi Eggerton. The way I got it fixed, by texting the Fairphone support. Because I still had warranty on the phone, I was able to send it in and they replaced the the charging module and battery. After that I reinstalled /e/ and everything is working fine now.
PS: to stop the phone from vibrating all the time when charging, I had to put it in Fast-Boot Mode so I could charge it up to back up some files and stuff.
Thanks. I contacted the support yesterday (of course so far no reply) and also ordered I new Bottom Module (to save some time). It should arrive in a few days. I hope exchanging the module will solve the problem and support can just order a refund for that order.
Update: I just recieved the new Bottom Module. After installing it, my FP3 can be charged normally again. So this module was the problem. Just FYI if anyone experiences the same problem.
Let’s see if Fairphone will at least refund me. So far I got no reply from their support. And I hope the new module will last much longer. My FP3 was barely one year old and I definitely did not treat it badly.
On the initial “Charge for a full cycle” instruction for my new Fairphone 3+, I hit this problem - I plugged it into the power; it would buzz, show a “powered by Android” splash screen, hold that for a while, show a battery icon briefly, blank screen for a while, then start over. After a while I tired of this and booted it to see if I could find what was going on; it was not at all informative. I left it overnight doing its buzz-splash-battery-quiet cycle, on the off-chance this was doing some good, but it clearly wasn’t.
How do I switch into Fast Boot mode, which someone mentioned might help ? I searched Settings for it (both using its search feature and just by grinding my way through each category it plausibly might be in) and found no sign of it.
I’ve tried with three old chargers and with the USB simply plugged into my desktop machine’s USB ports (various of them, just in case), all with the same result.
Fortunately the 'phone apparently came half-charged already, so I have a day or two before this is a crisis …
OK, trying that now …
(The boot-time menu is poorly phrased (using select in two different meanings; the reader has to guess that “use volume to select” means “use volume to cycle through available options” while “use power to select” means “use power to activate the currently-displayed option”.)
After booting that way, it still didn’t seem to be taking a charge, so I’m trying again but pausing at that dialog, to see if it manages to take charge while there.
I only have the one, that I bought yesterday, when I found out my new 'phone needed a cable I don’t have.
Which cable did you buy?
I had bad luck with a new USB-C cable (cheap crap from ebay). After my complain, the dealer said “cut the cable, send me a picture and you’ll get your money back…” - obviously, I wasn’t the only customer with problems. Now I bought one for the double price and everything works as expected.
It just describes itself as a “Type-C to USB cable”; apparently made by “shouxian electronic” in Hong Kong, according to the quiet paragraph of text just before all the certification icons.
There might be cables happily working non-certified, but there are cables out there failing, and I think I didn’t see a report of a USB-IF certified cable failing yet.
Unfortunately, with Oslo (where I live) under lockdown, open shops where I can buy equipment are rare as hen’s teeth and the one that sold me the cable I have probably broke the rules to do so. Not much I can do about that !
I find that Fairphone doesn’t ship to Norway, so can’t get them to send me a charger and cable that’ll solve the problem; and eSociety’s web-site, if it has chargers and cables, has them better hidden than I can find - can anyone post a link ?
