Earlier today, a report surfaced out of South Korea – Samsung’s homeland – that the company may be bringing the Galaxy Note 7 back from the dead, and would basically be selling refurbished units of the device, but with a smaller battery, in a hope that would solve the exploding issues the device had. Reports had stated that it would be between 3000mAh and 3200mAh, smaller than the original 3500mAh that was inside the Galaxy Note 7. Now Samsung is denying those reports. Now it’s worth mentioning that Samsung did explicitly say that they would not be selling refurbished units in India, but did not mention other countries. So they could be selling them in other emerging markets instead.
The Galaxy Note 7 was perhaps the most popular or talked about smartphone in 2016, but not for reasons that Samsung likes. The Galaxy Note 7 was recalled twice, due to the fact that the device had a tendency to explode and cause fires. This was due to the battery, which after months of investigating, Samsung has basically said that they will be doing a whole lot more testing on their batteries and products, to ensure that this doesn’t happen again. One recall is bad enough for an electronics company, but having to recall the same smartphone twice in less than two months is pretty unprecedented, and definitely hurts their reputation.
Now that Samsung has collected all of these Galaxy Note 7’s that could explode, the company is likely wondering what to do with them. Reports had surfaced before about the company selling them as refurbished units – with these reports dating back as far as November of last year. It’s still unclear what Samsung may end up doing with these devices, whether they may use the parts for other devices (like the RAM, iris scanner, etc) or just call it a day dispose of these devices. Samsung has been working hard on the Galaxy S8, which likely is using a different processor, so unfortunately the SoC powering the Galaxy Note 7 won’t be able to be used in some Galaxy S8 units when it finally launches in a few months.