Recently got my fp5 from warranty repair, it went well and just wanted to drop a quick report on how it looks. The problem with the phone was that the bottom microphone stopped working.

  1. It was really difficult for me to finally find the page where you can submit a warranty repair request. After meandering through useless support pages I ended up on the page shown below, which is where you submit a repair request (the green “easy repairs” button:

  2. Then you click the “diagnose issue” button

  3. You are then redirected to https://fairphone.b2x.com/ where the website guides you through the warranty repair request process. It asks you for the usual stuff like IMEI but also requests you to open the Android diagnostics menu thing to check audio (my issue was about audio, so with other issues it may be different), which I also followed.

  4. You then get an UPS shipping label. This part was also confusing because after you submit the repair request you get a few e-mails. One of those e-mails is a return label for when the repair is done or something? There’s no label to print in that e-mail. I don’t really remember super well what I did but either you open one of those e-mails that you get and go to the Cordon Electronics website and generate a label there, or you just get the label in one of the e-mails, it just may be in one of a few UPS e-mails that you get.

I didn’t pay anything for the shipping (to France from Poland and back).

  1. I removed the SD and sim card, factory reset my phone (this isn’t absolutely necessary, just for privacy), packed the phone into the original packaging that I still had. My phone had the bootloader unlocked so on boot it flashes the scary message about “something something bootloader unlocked if you touch this phone you die immediately”.

You also need to print 2 pages and include them in the package. The e-mails that you get after submitting the request also ask you to include printed proof of purchase (invoice that I just had on my e-mail acct) and a printed out page that contains info about your repair request (Cordon Electronics sends it to your e-mail, you just print it).

Slapped the UPS label I received to my e-mail on the package and threw it into a local package locker. It was shipped to France.

  1. I shipped it out on December 15h, it reached them on the 19th, and they shipped it back on the 23rd. Because of the holidays the phone reached me on January 5th, but in normal circumstances you can assume that normally it’d also take 4 days.

  2. I got the phone back with the battery removed so I had to pop it back in. I checked if the mic worked and it did. I also got a printed repair summary back, saying what they replaced. In my case it was the motherboard ribbon cable. It also said they preventatively updated the software (?) - I thought I had the latest available but they might’ve just installed it anyway.

I wonder if the repair wasn’t just removing the ribbon cable, turning it 180 degrees and popping it back in, as I can see in the pictures it has a direction lmao. I was messing with the internals before and might’ve damaged the ribbon cable myself. It’s interesting that the ribbon cable isn’t available as a spare part in the Fairphone store. If it broke past the warranty, I’d probably have to look for some dodgy replacement.