‘Attention, this phone will break if you restore factory settings’
Anyone who has a Nokia 5.3 should not reset the phone to the factory settings for the time being. A user who recently did this now reports that his phone has stopped working as a result. What is going on?
Nokia 5.3 problem
A user of a Nokia 5.3 was saddened to see that his phone no longer started up after he had reset the device to the factory settings. Factory reset erases all personal data from a phone, causing it to reboot normally as if it came out of the box for the first time. That is useful if you want to resell the device, for example, but things went wrong with the Nokia 5.3.
On the social news site Reddit, a user named “u/Linux-Is-Best” describes the problem. His phone – a budget device from 2020 – had only just received the November security update and the Android 12 update when the factory reset went wrong. When restarting, he briefly saw a text that he said resembled a URL, but after that the Nokia 5.3 could not start.
Bricked
Instead, he saw the message that no operating system works on the phone. A phone with such a problem is sometimes called bricked, which roughly translates as “like a brick”. The phone can then do nothing at all and there is usually no solution possible.
It is not entirely clear what exactly causes this critical error. There may have been an error updating the Nokia 5.3, but normally Android has a solution ready in such cases. A separate partition of your storage should always have the operating system installed in case an update goes wrong. In that case, in the event of a serious software error, you will never get a phone without an operating system. For some unknown reason, the Nokia 5.3 of these users apparently did not have a partition with Android 12 installed on it.
Phone rooted
There is an important caveat to this story, which is that ‘u/Linux-Is-Best’ in one of his responses suggests that his phone was ‘rooted’. That is, he has obtained full rights over the settings, with the result that he himself may have caused an error on his Nokia 5.3. Nokia’s support service was also not prepared to replace the phone free of charge and that probably also has to do with rooting the phone. In that case, you are in many cases responsible for all kinds of problems on your phone. Vaal therefore also voids the legal warranty.
Related articles
Nevertheless, users of the Nokia 5.3 are still cautious about restoring the factory settings for the time being, because it is not yet entirely certain what the cause of this problem is. There is in fact another user in the forum thread on Reddit who also had a broken Nokia 5.3 after restoring the factory settings. This seems to indicate an error in the latest update of the Nokia 5.3. We have asked Nokia for a response and will update this article as soon as we have it.
Have you ever destroyed a phone after trying to root it or flash another ROM? Maybe happened due to a critical error in an update? Let us know in the comments.
