Are replaced Samsung Galaxy Note 7s still overheating?

Note 7

Obviously Samsung would like to just crawl under a massive bed and hide until the Note 7 debacle is over, but it seems that won't be any time soon.

Firstly, the brand has delayed putting its high-end Galaxy Note 7 back on sale in its home country to enable it to get the recall finished as, according to the Wall Street Journal, there are still around 200,000 customers still to turn in their at-risk phablets.

This delay has raised questions about the efficiency of the recall program worldwide, although Samsung is understandably confident that everything is going as planned.

Well, not quite...

That confidence could be undermined by reports from the South Korean news network YTN that consumers are now reporting their replaced Note 7 units are overheating and losing power.

Update: Samsung has confirmed that it's aware of the issue, and will be examining the situation globally.

"Samsung takes customer safety very seriously and the reported issue is being investigated closely," it told TechRadar.

It's unlikely that Samsung would have messed up the replacement of the phone, such is the imperative to make sure the new batch of Note 7s are working fine, but users are claiming that even while charging the phone is getting hot and losing power.

Samsung has acknowledged the issue with the new units, but was quick to say the new issues were "completely unrelated to batteries" and isolated, according to the Wall Street Journal.

In fairness to the smartphone manufacturer, there are always cases of malfunctioning units whenever a large rollout of devices occurs, thanks to variations that can occur in production. It could also be software that's still got a few bugs lurking in the system thanks to Samsung needing to improve the platform as soon as possible.

However, it's clear that the brand needs to get this under control soon to instil confidence in users that this is a phone worth buying; we loved it in our Galaxy Note 7 review – but we never saw it catch fire or randomly discharge.

Gareth Beavis
Formerly Global Editor in Chief

Gareth has been part of the consumer technology world in a career spanning three decades. He started life as a staff writer on the fledgling TechRadar, and has grown with the site (primarily as phones, tablets and wearables editor) until becoming Global Editor in Chief in 2018. Gareth has written over 4,000 articles for TechRadar, has contributed expert insight to a number of other publications, chaired panels on zeitgeist technologies, presented at the Gadget Show Live as well as representing the brand on TV and radio for multiple channels including Sky, BBC, ITV and Al-Jazeera. Passionate about fitness, he can bore anyone rigid about stress management, sleep tracking, heart rate variance as well as bemoaning something about the latest iPhone, Galaxy or OLED TV.