To Asus and all owners of a dead Zenfone 8

[leoncarrera]

By now is it clear the Asus Zenfone 8 has a weakness when it comes to its motherboard. Phones are dying in very comparable situations; after installing an update or patch and/ or when charging. The died phones show the same state: a sudden black screen, no response on buttons or screen, sometimes an orange fast blinking LED for about ten seconds when the charger is attached, after which also this stops blinking. Even the life duration of the phones are alike when this happens;  around two years.  Some people are lucky that it can be repaired under warranty, most aren't when warranty has just expired.

All of the phones which were repaired received a new motherboard. So also in here the fix seems comparable. Or at least not repairable with a soldering or partial replacement of other components. There is no wide variety of repairs to be found on ZenTalk on this. 

This issue goes beyond individual or even wrong use, a single faulty or unfortunate phone. All phones that died did this in comparable situations and after comparable life times. There is something wrong with the design or components of the Zenfone 8, or at least a batch, which can't be put on warranty alone when it comes to a repair. 

Asus, please take this matter and your clients serious. At least more then you have proven till this date. Asus can't just address this matter with the initial question if the phone is still under the warranty. Asus does know what the technical issues are with these phones, so please then also take your responsibility. Asus put this premium phone on the market at a premium price. This comes with an expected life duration that goes beyond a hard line of just 24 months. Warranty is for specific situations. These dying Zenfones are not specific. It is a general issue. So please handle it as such.

Can Asus confirm that they will keep addressing issues regarding these dying Zenfones as individual technical matters? And thus with warranty as strict and main component to define if Asus or customers are financially responsible for further action? And if so, what is their response to these resembling dying phones that Asus will keep holding onto this strict warranty duration when it is clear customers can't be held responsible for their broken Zenfones, since they die during normal use or especially after installing new and updated Asus firmware?

To all users of a died Zenfone 8: please add your phone to this thread, when it died (lifetime) and on which occurence. 

Kind regards,
León

[leoncarrera]

Unfortunate to read you teamed up with the bricked phon squad. 

You are right that is seemd to happen when the phone is put under some stress. Many cases happened during charging and use of camera. Timeline wise I'm not so sure when it peaked. My first dead ZF8 was August last year. It seemed to have picked up after then. There have been two updates in between. The last update (332) indeed seems to have worsened it, but that is just guessing from the people reacting in this thread. I've no inight in the overall cases. I'm sure Asus has. But it is alarming that many cases are being showed right after two years, which means many people can't opt for warranty repair. And that is still the real issue here. 

If is is hardware or software related, one influences the other in this matter. Even when the software is buggy, it should not fry or whatever the mb. And from what I could find, it is always the mb to cpu which caused the breakdown. The most specific cases I could find is that of a bad connection between the cpu and mb which makes is prone to stress, like charging and use of camera. The latter isn't liked by the ZF8 anyways. A videocall drains the battery in no time and heats the whole phone, like it can't disperse its heat.

I'm afraid you lost unique memories with those photo's. I havent heard a case the phone was repaired or even brought back to life with the storage intact. Apart from some guys who reballed the cpu.

[nvubu]

@leoncarrera 

"Apart from some guys who reballed the cpu."

Do you have any further info on this - or can remember which thread it was in, as this needs to be followed up to find out what they did.

[Ramkumar_R]

My case: I used the camera to take a picture. And everything stopped.

[leoncarrera]

Tried to look it up again, since it was last August '23 when I did my 'research' for my dead ZF8. Then it were just a few unofficial repair shops in Asia (Thailand, Taiwan itself as the home of Asus) and a couple of tech forum guys who had done the reballing succesfully, mainly to recover the data. All read via different tech and spare part sites.

A quick Google search just now did not gives me specific addresses. I'll try to give it a deeper search later on if I can find those boards again.

This reballing I saw then was before the flood of dying phones, so I also looked at it differently then and thought of it as too much hassle while I'm no tech guy on that level myself. One thing I remember for sure and that was they all mentioned the weak and 'not clean' connection between CPU and MB.

[JohnWick_]

I use zenfone 8 right now and downgraded to 12, i dont want to get these problems haha, also on 12 the battery last longer, look at that clean deep sleep line, you dont see that on 13