ASUS flagships with Snapdragon 888 seem to be bricking left and right
One user reached out to us to that it’s happening, while he also shared quite a few links to ASUS ZenTalk forums. It seems like some ASUS flagships with the Snapdragon 888 are suffering from an unknown defect. That defect leads to a motherboard replacement. Do note that things changed since then, as these reports are mainly from August, September, and October, so let’s first talk about them. So, what’s happening? Well, phones seem to be freezing during use, and when users reboot them, they get to an error state. The error in question is “waiting for flashing full ramdump”. It is reported that some users have managed to exit that state with a certain key combination, but most have not. The first reported issue was about the ZenFone 8 back in August. Those reports have spread since then, though. The reports now include the ZenFone 8 Flip and ROG Phone 5 as well. There are quite a few reports on the forums (1, 2, 3).
ASUS sorted out the “ramdump” problem, but things are even worse now
Now, it seems like an update arrived to all three devices, and that update solved the ramdump error, at least for some users. There is another issue now, though. The screen goes black and users are unable to restart the phone at all. Same as with the ramdump issue, there are quite a few reports about this on the forums as well (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6). Needless to say, this is quite a serious problem. It seems like ASUS did not officially report back on these reports, it did not give out an explanation, or at least we didn’t spot one. The company needs to reach as soon as possible and figure out what’s going on here. This is not a small bug that is affecting the devices, it’s quite a serious problem that makes phones useless, basically.
