Update 14:16 11/10/2016:
Samsung has finally thrown in the towel and said in a regulatory filing that no more of the Samsung Galaxy Note 7 smartphones would be made or sold.
“Taking our customer’s safety as our highest priority, we have decided to halt sales and production of the Galaxy Note 7.”
The fallout was severe; the South Korean electronics company saw its shares plummet in value, losing nearly $19 billion. Users of the smartphone are asked to power them down and to stop using them.
Original Article:
It’s been a tough couple of months for Samsung. The Galaxy Note 7 was supposed to be the latest flagship smartphone from the South Korean company. It was supposed to be the first shot in the firing war with the (at the time) unannounced iPhone 7. Instead what users got was a fire hazard. Despite boasting a plethora of features from iris-scanning to USB-C charging to curved edges, what stood out was the battery. Or rather, what blew up was the battery.
Samsung has seen its latest flagship devices get recalled due to faulty batteries, the most severe of which saw the smartphones blow up and cause injuries. A fault was found in the battery suppliers and all seemed well as they resumed sales by the end of September. However, instead of paddling into shallow water Samsung seem to have sailed back into a typhoon as replacement Note 7s started catching fire.
The result? Samsung is reportedly halting the production of the Samsung Galaxy Note 7. The first report to break about the unexpected turn of events was by Korean news agency Yonhap, with The New York Times corroborating the news. The halt in production is said to be in cooperation with safety regulators in the US, China, and Korea. Cooperation may be stretching it as US mobile carriers took it upon themselves to stop issuing the Note 7, whilst offering exchanges and refunds for devices already in use.
This is most likely a temporary halt in production as Samsung tries to figure out where exactly in the production line things are going wrong.
