Dec 03, 2016 10:02 PM
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We just can't trust the hardware, given the ongoing reports of battery fires.Don't buy the Galaxy Note 7, and return it if you've already bought it.Samsung has stopped production of the Galaxy Note 7.
The company earlier had asked carriers around the world to suspend sales of the phone. The US Consumer Product Safety Commission has gone further, saying, "Consumers should power down and stop using all Galaxy Note 7s."
We agree. You shouldn't buy a Galaxy Note 7, even if you can still find one. And if you already own one, you should immediately turn it off and exchange it for a different, non-Note 7 phone. All US cellular carriers and Best Buy(among others) will exchange your Note 7 for phones of equal value on the same network. Similar schemes apply in the UK and Australia.When we first reviewed the Galaxy Note 7 in August, we found it to be one of the best phones of the year. A big beautiful AMOLED screen, excellent camera, some truly useful S-Pen tools and a big battery that lasted for hours.
And then a few dozen of those batteries burst into flames.
battery-note-7-092016rev.jpgEnlarge Image
The new Note 7 has a green battery icon.
Samsung
Since then, Samsung has initiated one of the biggest recalls in consumer electronics history, and recalled more than 2.5 million Note 7 phones globally. And now, the company has a replacement batch ready: more than half a million new Note 7s, with batteries that Samsung says don't have the defect that caused the fires in the first round.
So: if you want a big-screen Android phone, the corrected Note 7 is the way to go, right?
Not so fast. Samsung needs to rebuild trust here, and we're not ready to just endorse the corrected phone and call it a day. To that end, we're waiting at least until the end of October to see if any further reports of Note 7 issues crop up.(We're also testing corrected Note 7 phones in the wild, but just because we don't see a problem with our new review samples doesn't mean that there aren't any outstanding issues. After all, the original battery issue appeared in only a small fraction of the phones shipped from the original batch.)
In the meantime, we're keeping this updated review here - unrated - while we continue to seek out real-world feedback on users' experience with the corrected version of the Note 7.
