Galaxy Note 7 swap, refund applications to start September 13

According to Richard Fink, vice-president of IT and Mobile for Samsung Electronics Australia, the company will start handing out replacement Galaxy Note 7 units by September 21. Airline passengers were warned by U.S. authorities not to use or charge the phones while on board planes.

Samsung “has to contain the battery explosions but people are not returning the phones”, said Peter Yu, an analyst at BNP Paribas.

SAMSUNG Electronics Co Ltd’s shares fell to their lowest level in almost two months yesterday after the tech giant told customers to switch off and return their new Galaxy Note 7 smartphones due to fire-prone batteries. Unfortunately for the South Korean company, the Galaxy Note 7 has become more infamous than anything.

People who choose to receive a new Galaxy Note 7 would need to register on Samsung’s Web site from Monday next week, and deliveries of replacements are expected to begin on September 23, the company said. “The problem can be simply resolved by changing the battery, but we’ll come up with convincing measures for our consumers”, the Samsung official told Yonhap.

During the past week, Samsung said they understood customer concerns and the company wanted to emphasise the importance of exchanging the defecting models.

Koh Dong-Jin, the head of Samsung’s mobile business, said earlier the fault rate for the Note 7 amounted to 24 handsets per million and it would take about two weeks to prepare replacements. The company also advised customers to not use their phones until they could get a free replacement.

While the risks of flying with lithium-ion-powered devices have always been discussed in the aviation industry and millions of these devices are carried onboard, used frequently and charged in flight, there have been few instances of actual mobile device battery-related fires in flight. The family has been in contact with Samsung but its case is far from unique. Samsung then realized that the issue was actually in the battery, which halted all sales. The CPSC are in process of calling a full recall of the product line in coordination with Samsung.

Drawing upon prior litigation experience covering the rapid recharge feature of commercial cell phones, Morgan says that one of the key things that “compromises a battery is if it charges too fast”, he tells TheDCNF.

Samsung is on its way to court, and it’s not even over the Galaxy Note 7.

“Based on a thorough inspection, we are now confident that the battery issue has been completely resolved in the replacement devices that will be arriving in Europe shortly”, he said. “Samsung has a huge black eye”, Enderle said.