Samsung’s Galaxy S8 and Galaxy S8 Plus flagship handsets have a number of reports under their belts of not working properly with Samsung’s official wireless charging solutions in some capacity, and Samsung has finally responded to its users about the issue. According to SamsungViv on the company’s community forums, the company is not only aware of the issue, but is actively investigating it. A quick fix was also recommended for the user that was responded to; since forum user userMqNXa2leNh reported being able to charge the phone with the wireless charger normally but not when in Dock Mode, SamsungViv told them to try laying the phone on its side, but said that this could also be “hit or miss”. SamsungViv’s post, notably, did not identify whether this anomaly is a hardware or software problem.
With how little information was included in what amounted to an official response to the problem from Samsung, it’s likely safe to assume that a fix is far off. Users have been reporting all sorts of issues with wirelessly charging their phones in Samsung’s official chargers and docks as far back as April. Some users are reporting no function at all, while others are reporting that the dock works with the phone laid down but not stood up, and still others, like userMqNXa2leNh, are reporting issues with docking. The range of issues is quite wide, and no single fix seems appropriate for all of them.
This issue is nowhere near catastrophic, compared to some of Samsung’s past blunders. Affected users can just as easily use a USB Type-C cable to charge their phones, or buy a third-party wireless charger, if none of the various quick fixes floating around the Samsung community work for them. It should be noted that there doesn’t seem to be any reports of similar issues with the DeX Dock, though that apparatus has some reports of its own problems, such as suddenly shutting down or not being able to accept an ethernet connection out of the box. For the time being, it doesn’t look like Samsung will be providing any recourse to affected users until the company gets this issue fully figured out. Fixing it could be as simple as sending out a software update for affected phones, or something could be physically wrong with either the phones or the accessories, which would mean that Samsung would have to replace them.