Good day all. The Angry Webmaster appears to have locked himself in the Anger Central Entertainment center again, which means he’s spending the weekend binge watching something. This leave it to me to speak about Samsung’s recall of every one of their Galaxy Note 7 smartphones outside of China.
The Galaxy Note is a really large smartphone, generally referred to as a “Phablet’. This is a combination of Phone and Tablet. Yes, these things are really that big. You can uses them as emergency paddles if you happen to be caught up the creek without one. Yesterday news came out that all sales of the Note 7 had been stopped and that all Note 7’s are being recalled. The reason? The batteries are malfunctioning and exploding. Here are some of the details from Fox News:
Samsung halted sales of the Galaxy Note 7 smartphone Friday after finding batteries of some of the devices exploded while they were charged.
Koh Dong-jin, president of Samsung’s mobile business, said customers who already bought Note 7s will be able to swap them for new smartphones, regardless of when they purchased them. Note 7 sales launched just two weeks ago.
Well that was nice of them.
Samsung issued its first global recall of the flagship smartphone because it has not found ways to specify exactly which phones may endanger the user. The smartphones are being yanked from shelves in 10 countries, including the U.S. and South Korea.
A few years ago, I looked at smartphones and decided to go with the Samsung Galaxy S3. Last year, when it was time to upgrade, I looked at the Samsung Galaxy S6 series. When I learned that Samsung was no longer providing expansion slots for SD cards and was using an integrated battery, I decided to go with the LG G4 phones.
This was a good call since one of the phones we purchased also had a bad battery. All I needed to do was get a replacement battery and that phone has been good to go ever since. If I had decided to go with the S6 or S7 series, and the battery had gone bad, the entire phone would have had to be replaced, and that would have been a major loss for Samsung.
Samsung said it has sold more than 1 million Note 7 smartphones since the product’s Aug. 19 launch. It has manufactured about 2.5 million Note 7 phones so far, some of them still in inventory. Koh said they also will be returned and swapped with new ones.
Since I have no interest in the Note 7, I don’t know what the wholesale or retail price is, but I expect it to be in the $500 and up range. Because of Samsung’s decision to go with a fixed, integrated battery, they are going to take a major hit this year to their bottom line.
The latest version of the LG G series phones actually took the replaceable battery one step further with a battery that can be removed without removing the case and allowing plugin devices to be added that come with their own batteries. I looked at those as well, but since we had just bought the G4’s, decided to pass on them.
I hope that Samsung learns it’s lesson when it comes to using fixed batteries. While most of the time, people don’t need to have a second battery, the option to be able to switch it out is, in my opinion, very important. Fixed batteries are just a way for the manufacturers to force people to buy new phones. When the battery stops holding a charge, instead of dropping $20 for a new battery, you end up having to drop $500 for a new phone, and hoping it won’t blow up in your face.
Thank you
~The Angry Systems Administrator~
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