Samsung isn’t taking reports of exploding Galaxy Note 7’s lightly. The company is delaying shipments of its latest flagship until it can do more quality control testing.
image: KKJ.CN
Samsung told Reuters, “shipments of the Galaxy Note 7 are being delayed due to additional tests being conducted for product quality.” We’ve reached out to Samsung for comment and for better clarity about what these delays mean.
Galaxy Note 7 devices were already shipping in some countries, with its official US release slotted for September 2. The Australian release date was August 19.
The shipment delay follows a few unconfirmed reports from Asia where Galaxy Note 7 devices exploded while being charged. The first incident was reported last week and a second exploding phone report surfaced earlier today.
In the second case, a user posted about an explosion to the South Korean social network Kakao. BusinessKorea cites a friend who described the incident this way:
There was another explosion of the Galaxy Note 7. It was my friend’s phone. A Samsung employee checked the site and he is currently in talks over the compensation with Samsung. You should use its original charger just in case and leave the phone far away from where you are while charging.
It seems possible that the USB-C charging cable used in the second incident was faulty.
That’s all we know about the first incident too. The phone burned up while charging. The type of cable in that first incident is unknown (though some reports suggest that it was a non-official cable connected to a micro-USB adaptor).
We’ve known for a while that cheap USB-C cables can mean death for your laptop or smartphone. In the past, we’ve seen reported incidents of iPhone users using faulty, non-official charging cables bursting as well.
Samsung is doing the right thing by taking precautions until it can investigate the quality of its components, but all users should be reminded that using those cheap, knock-off cables is a bad idea.
[Reuters]