Samsung launched the Galaxy Note 7 earlier this month, and the phablet has since received rave reviews from the media and public alike. However, some recent reports are putting a dampener on what is widely believed to be the best smartphone money can buy right now. According to a number of posts on various Android forums, the phone seems to be suffering from crashes, bootloops and automatic restarts without any rhyme or reason. The most disconcerting aspect, however, is that some of the devices have apparently conked out cold and are refusing to even boot up. Yet others are stuck in a never-ending bootloop – sometimes even in recovery mode – making them unusable for all practical purposes.
Many who’re complaining about such problems are also saying that they’re running the stock firmware on their un-rooted phones and that the problems started right after installing one of the updates that was pushed out by Samsung recently. Whether the update indeed has anything to do with the problems can only be determined after Samsung gets to the bottom of it, but for the time being, there’s no official acknowledgement from the company that they’re even aware of the issue. Although, with so many people pouring into popular forums with their complaints, it is unlikely that the South Korean firm is yet to hear about it. Meanwhile, some users whose devices are still functional even after installing the recent update, are also lending their voices to the growing chorus. According to them, their phones have now started overheating while doing the minutest of chores, to the point of becoming almost unusable.
One crucial aspect to this whole unseemly episode is that just about everybody reporting these issues seem to be using the international model that’s powered by the Exynos 8890. While reports of the Snapdragon-powered Galaxy Note 7 facing similar problems haven’t yet started popping up on internet forums, it is still too early to say with any degree of certainly that the problem is restricted to the international model only. Hopefully though, this is just a software glitch that can be rectified with an OTA update, but in case there’s a hardware problem, taking care of it will likely be a much more painstaking and expensive exercise.