As the issues around Samsung’s Galaxy Note 7 charging and battery continue, it looks like the Korean smartphone manufacturer will be taking more direct action to prevent more devices bursting into flames advising they will be capping the phones ability to charge at 60% of capacity.
At present Samsung’s home market of South Korea is the only country confirmed to be received the update which will commence rolling out via an OTA update from September 20 at 10 AM local time. There is no word if this program will roll out beyond the borders of South Korea but after repeated warnings to users to stop using the phone have seemingly failed – we hope it will.
AT 60% it should stop the device lasting a full day for all but the lightest users, and perhaps drive the few people who “didn’t know” there was an issue back to their place of purchase to complain, at which point more informed people can advise them of the issue.
Limiting the charging capacity will be a good first step in reducing the number of fires, however, it won’t stop “hardcore” users who will just leave the device plugged in while using it, which in itself will still present an issue.
We have reached out to Samsung Australia to ask if there are any known plans to roll this out here following the replacement program commencing on the 21st of September.
We shouldn’t need to say this by now but, STOP using your Galaxy Note 7.
What do you think of Samsung’s plan to use an OTA to reduce the chance of fires?
They must have been reading the Ausdroid comments on the weekend…
I doubt this will be rolled out globally as you’ll then have to contend with carriers delaying or outright blocking the update.
They don’t need to test the update, as it’s aim is to cripple the device – so I don’t see that being an issue.
For the generic Aus variant that’s true. For carrier variants (Telstra, Optus, etc) the carrier still needs to approve the update even if it’s a device crippling update.
Could you imagine the PR disaster if a carrier did anything other that immediately accept the updated firmware and a branded device burst into flames? They should go one step further and lock the device while charging, put a splash screen up saying due to battery fault your phone is locked while charging, please contact xyz for more information!
The carrier most likely to hold up the update (should it be rolled out globally) is Telstra (Telstra branded Sony Z5 owners will know what I mean). According to their last update post on CrowdSupport, resource constraints have delayed approval of a bunch of updates.
“resource constraints” means they’re short on people due to extreme offshoring and outsourcing that cause various outages (read disasters) on Telstra network.