A few months ago, many were touting the Samsung Galaxy Note 7 as potentially the best Android smartphone of 2016, and rightfully so. Samsung’s flagship seemingly has everything: a great display, powerful internals, two great cameras, the extremely useful S-Pen, and a waterproof body. The phablet was supposed to conclude the Holy Trinity of Samsung’s 2016 Galaxy lineup which started with the release of the Galaxy S7 and Galaxy S7 Edge earlier this year. Unfortunately, it just wasn’t meant to be. Someone or someones messed something up. The official version of the full story is still non-existent as Samsung seemingly hasn’t yet concluded its investigation into the matter but the current facts are pretty clear. The Galaxy Note 7 debuted in late August and first reports of the device catching fire and exploding followed soon after. Samsung issued a worldwide recall of the phone by September, spent a few weeks looking into the matter, announced that battery defects have been removed, implied—but never confirmed—that Samsung SDI was manufacturing faulty batteries, issued replacements, and accomplished – not much, frankly.
As the Galaxy Note 7 replacement units proved to be just as much of a fire hazards as their predecessors, Samsung was forced to issue an unprecedented second recall and discontinue the device which everyone was expecting to be a huge commercial success. If you were ever doubting the validity of this decision for whatever reason—after all, a few phones always catch fire here and there due to a bad batch—Samsung has now officially confirmed the gravity of the situation. Namely, the South Korean tech giant has just announced that it has managed to verify exactly 23 reports of Galaxy Note 7 units catching fire due to internal reasons after the initial recall in the US alone. Granted, most of these cases involved original units but that’s still an alarming number for a device which has only been officially retailed for a couple of weeks. Also, this is just the US, and it’s not like Galaxy Note 7 wasn’t making problems anywhere else in the world.
Unfortunately, Samsung didn’t use this opportunity to release an update regarding the Galaxy Note 7 recall process. At the moment, it’s widely believed that up to 1 million units are still out in the wild. Until discontinuing the phablet earlier this week, Samsung shipped approximately 1.9 million devices.