Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Samsung Knew a Third Replacement Note 7 Caught Fire On Tuesday and Said Nothing (theverge.com)

Posted by msmash on from the not-cool,-samsung dept.

If you had started to feel sympathetic for Samsung, or safer with the Note 7, its latest flagship smartphone, don't be. Another replacement Samsung Galaxy Note 7 has caught fire, making it three of such incident this week alone. Read how poorly Samsung has dealt with the situation, via The Verge: This one was owned by Michael Klering of Nicholasville, Kentucky. He told WKYT that he woke up at 4AM to find his bedroom filled with smoke and his phone on fire. Later in the day, he went to the hospital with acute bronchitis caused by smoke inhalation. "The phone is supposed to be the replacement, so you would have thought it would be safe," Klering told WKYT, saying that he had owned the replacement phone for a little more than a week. "It wasn't plugged in. It wasn't anything, it was just sitting there."The most unsettling part is that Samsung knew of Klering's phone, and didn't say anything.

4 of 110 comments (clear)

  1. Issue with batteries or with phone design? by alvinrod · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I'm beginning to wonder if it's an issue with something other than just the battery. Otherwise Samsung would be incredibly idiotic to send out replacement parts that suffer from the same problem. The alternatives are that a massive mistake led to sending out defective units as replacements without fixing them first, or that Samsung's battery supplier (I think I read that the source all or most of them from third parties) wasn't fully aware of the extend of their problems and have shipped more bad batteries.

    1. Re:Issue with batteries or with phone design? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Samsung has had a lot of quality control issues. My Note 4 could no longer charge after a year because the USB port quit working, making the phone basically worthless. When I looked it up, apparently this is a very well known issue that impacts almost every phone Samsung makes.

      captcha: freezers

  2. "...what he keeps threatening to do do" by JoeyRox · · Score: 3, Interesting

    The full Samsung text message was "Just now got this. I can try and slow him down if we think it will matter, or we just let him do what he keeps threatening to do and see if he does it"

    Someone Mr. Klering conveniently failed to share with the news station what exactly he was threatening to do against Samsung that lead to that text message exchange between Samsung employees and which accidentally reached him instead. I'm guessing it was something more than just "I'm going to share what happened to my phone with the authorities".

    1. Re:"...what he keeps threatening to do do" by Lunix+Nutcase · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Because he was in the hospital and trying to work with Samsung until he got that message sent to him?