Smoking a cigarette indoors is not illegal everywhere, but it is highly frowned upon in most places. When the object emitting smoke is a smartphone instead of something that’s supposed to be smoking, frowning upon that action can turn to full-blown panic, as it did for Dee Decasa of Honolulu. A home video caught by a camera up in the corner of the living room shows a distraught Decasa emerging from her bedroom and rousing a sleeping man from the couch. The pair go to the kitchen, where Decasa sets the phone down in an aluminum pan, walks away, and promptly faints. Just moments ago, she had taken a screenshot of the Samsung website confirming that her now-charred device was in fact on the safe list. Apparently, this incident took place on Sunday, October 9th.
This marks the sixth confirmed case of a replacement and “safe” Galaxy Note 7 unit catching fire with no provocation in the United States alone, and the video serves as a chilling reminder to those who may not have bought one or who may think their unit won’t explode; the danger of a smartphone literally bursting into flames at any second is always very real, and the chances are much, much higher when the smartphone in question is a Samsung Galaxy Note 7.
Samsung’s efforts at damage control have been abysmal at best at this point; when the initial recall happened, they didn’t get the US Consumer Product Safety Commission involved, which made the whole process start off on a less than perfect start, with Samsung being the only ones spreading the word when it all began. The recall went about as smoothly as it could have from there, until replacement units started blowing up. Since then, sales and production on the Galaxy Note 7 have outright stopped, and retailers and carriers the world over are giving customers refunds or exchanges of any Note 7 units they bought to help them distance themselves from the exploding handsets. Samsung’s PR nightmare with the phone is apparently not without its consequences; whispers among analysts point to about $17 billion as the possible fallout from the whole saga, when it’s all said and done, and some 34 percent of Galaxy Note 7 buyers in a survey said they won’t go near another Samsung device.