Are we looking at the beginning of the end of Samsung’s Galaxy Note 7?
I wouldn’t have considered raising the question a few weeks ago, even after Samsung announced the recall of more than 2.5 million Note 7s globally, amid reports the lithium-ion batteries inside the phones were overheating and catching fire.
Samsung intimated that the exchange of at-risk Note 7s for safe replacement devices was going along swimmingly. More than 60% of the faulty phones were traded in, and most were swapped for the new Notes.
My expectation was that Samsung, one of the leading electronics powerhouses in the world and with an awful lot at stake in the matter, would get to the bottom of Battery-gate and fix it.
That was before I heard that a replacement Note 7 apparently caught fire Wednesday morning on a Southwest Airlines flight bound from Louisville to Baltimore. For the record, Samsung says it is still investigating, and maybe there is a reasonable explanation here.
But there have been reports of other replacement Note 7s overheating, and at the very least the Southwest incident has to give you pause.
In a statement emailed to USA TODAY, U.S. Consumer Products Safety Commission chairman Elliot Kaye, says that “CPSC is moving expeditiously to investigate this incident.”
