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Samsung To Sell Refurbished Galaxy Note 7 With a Smaller Battery, Says Report (androidauthority.com) 73

Posted by BeauHD from the back-from-the-dead dept.
According to a report via The Korean Economic Daily, Samsung is said to be putting refurbished Galaxy Note 7 handsets on sale with new batteries following the cancellation of the device late last year. The speculation suggests the smartphones could be relaunched this June. Android Authority reports: Samsung is said to be swapping the Note 7's 3,500 mAh batteries with a "3,000 to 3,200 mAh" batteries, according to The Korean Economic Daily's sources, predominately for sale in emerging markets such as India and Vietnam. The move is said to be part of Samsung's plan to recover costs from the initial device recall and avoid environmental penalties from the estimated 2.5 million or so Galaxy Note 7s it would have to dispose of. Samsung hasn't made any official announcements in this vein, but before the battery investigation concluded, a spokesperson did tell us that the company was: "Reviewing possible options that can minimize the environmental impact of the recall." Shifting refurbished units would certainly be one way to achieve that.
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Samsung To Sell Refurbished Galaxy Note 7 With a Smaller Battery, Says Report More

Samsung To Sell Refurbished Galaxy Note 7 With a Smaller Battery, Says Report

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  • Things that go boom (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    In other news - Vietnam has an ongoing problem dealing with unexploded ordinance.... looks like it isn't getting better any time soon.

  • Fire sale on refurbished Note 7's in June (Score:5, Insightful)

    by naughtynaughty ( 1154069 ) on Tuesday February 21, 2017 @07:57PM (#53908671)

    Actually a good plan to save an otherwise really nice phone. I'd buy one if the price was right.

  • What about the airlines? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by The Grim Reefer ( 1162755 ) on Tuesday February 21, 2017 @08:04PM (#53908701)
    Did the FAA lift the ban on these?

    • Maybe we'll need some certification sticker on the refurbs to take them on airplanes?

    • Re: What about the airlines? (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Not officially, but since the problem was the battery and not the phone, and over 95% of shipped units were recovered, it doesn't make sense to continue the ban.
      Especially when they still haven't banned the iPhones over in China that have been blowing up due to similar battery problems.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by torkus ( 1133985 )

        They no longer announce them on planes.

        While still banned, it's not something on the immediate radar anymore.

        Plus Samsung just needs to brand them 'Note 7a' or 7.1 or something so it's clearly different.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

      Did the FAA lift the ban on these?

      Yes. When it was revealed like 95% of the recalled phones have been returned, the FAA removed the ban seeing that most of the phones are gone, and the few remaining ones were to commit digital suicide by refusing to charge the battery anymore.

      • Your FAA may have stopped the ban but I caught international flights with Qatar this week and they still made pre-flight announcements.

  • Deflation (Score:5, Funny)

    by Tablizer ( 95088 ) on Tuesday February 21, 2017 @08:09PM (#53908719) Journal

    If the battery is smaller, it cannot be a galaxy. Rename it Star Cluster Note 7.

    Or more appropriately, Cluster Fuck 7.

  • "yes, kids. back in my day we had things called smartphones that exploded!" ooooooo...

  • I'm not sure I follow (Score:4, Insightful)

    by rmdingler ( 1955220 ) on Tuesday February 21, 2017 @08:15PM (#53908749) Journal
    Kill your #2 best selling phone in a rather respectable, billion dollar act of seppuku, and then bring the maternal copulater back?

    The smaller battery could've fixed it in the first place if you'd left the easily replaced battery as a bloody option. Twats.

    • Let me break it down for you: high end phone for a low end price. Everybody's a winner.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by cdrudge ( 68377 )

        Everybody's a winner.

        Unless you're a Samsung stockholder. Or the original battery supplier. Or the engineer that designed or spec'ed it. Or one of the victims.

    • Did one explode in your pocket? In your house? Anywhere? Did you *own* one even? No???

      Then what's your frikkin' gripe??

      First of all the batteries with issues weren't make by Samsung, second only an extremely, extremely small number of them had any issues. Third, I give the company a lot of credit for attempting to push the envelope as close to margins as possible with their designs - that's something to be applauded, not derided.

      I'm sick of these idiotic, griping posts bashing the company by ppl with a

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by adolf ( 21054 )

      We've been through this before: It wouldn't have helped.

      Sure, it'd have fixed the fire problem for people who follow the rules. But it'd still be banned from commercial flights because there's no way in hell an airline will inspect the battery to ensure that it has been properly replaced and is of the correct vintage.

      Furthermore, plenty of folks (myself included, because I'm daft like that) would have refused to return the old, too-big battery and kept it as a spare.

      As much as I want easily-swapped batter

    • Or maybe with the user replaceable battery it would have been smaller to begin with and even smaller now. But clearly you're much smarter than the world's largest smartphone manufacturer.

  • Use it on international trips and when you come back and CBP wants to spy on your phone tell them its a Note 7 and watch them clear you immediately so they dont have to deal with it. Alternately you can offer to let them keep it in their evidence locker but if it blows up all their evidence not to blame you.

  • Market research feels that people will be much more open to a smaller incendiary device which instead of burning your house down and killing you will only cause 3rd degree burns on a single limb.

    • Right, so insightful. The only real question remaining in consumer's minds these days is whether to buy their dangerous device from Samsung or Apple [gsmarena.com]

  • They'd probably sell better in areas above the Arctic circle (especially if they left the original battery in).

  • .. it'll be a fire sale! ;)

  • Now that Samsung is saying the phones could have been fixed by replacing the battery, those phones where bricked for no reason.

  • Facts are: There was nothing wrong with the phones themselves, except the batteries. Samsung first had the problem that some batteries were physically larger than they should have been, which _will_ cause problems. Then they had a second problem, that in order to fix the first problem, they rushed other suppliers to deliver high capacity batteries before they were properly designed. Lots of the damage to the brand was caused by the fact that they first had a problem, said it was fixed, and then had the exac
    • "if you had enough time to do it a second time, you had enough time to do it right the first time."

      Though in Samsungs case, "Third times the charm"?

      I still think its funny there's this talk about e-waste from disposal of the phones. Somehow it was left out that they need to get rid of 2.5 million 3500 mAh batteries. Don't those count as environmental waste? Are they going to be properly disposed of? ....Don't tell me Samsung just took a sander/file/saw to the existing batteries and slapped them back

  • That was the decision of , no not the CEO, but the Prime Minister of North Korea. The resulting headline Kim Jong Un shoots down Samsung's plans was definitely more agreeable and PR friendly compared to Samsung comes up with a Big Bang which was perceived to be taken literally by the smart phone crowd, which turned out be be smarter than average after all.

  • My phone isn't going to get upgraded. I don't want my dad to upgrade it because I'm interested in the simpler Nokia. I have to get an iPad for writing things and other stuff because my phone's screen is too small for writing.

  • As long as the smaller batteries allow for expansion in situ, this is great... better than destroying an otherwise good product (and yes, I am an iPhone fanatic).

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