According to a spokesperson for the company, in a statement to The Verge, the percentage represents an “extraordinarily fast start” toward Samsung’s goal of taking out all Galaxy Note 7 devices with faulty batteries out of circulation.
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Philippe Curtis says he plugged his phone in the garage to charge while his daughters were getting ready for school. Not all Galaxy Note 7’s were affected.
He threw the phone out of the garage so it wouldn’t catch anything else on fire. There will also be a square symbol on the label of the packaging box to distinguish the new replacement phones.
If reports are to be believed, Samsung has strategically made a decision to place its launch date around the festive season in India, which is home to world’s second largest smartphone market.
In Samsung’s home market of South Korea, where the exchange program began Monday and where customers could seek a full refund until Monday, Samsung said only that the number of refund seekers was “very low”. In Singapore, a customer submitted a claim of a device which had caught fire, but could not prove that claim because they said they had thrown the device out of their auto window after it had caught fire.
Samsung says new Galaxy Note 7 smartphones will be available in USA stores starting Wednesday to replace about 1 million devices that are being recalled because their batteries can catch fire.
The U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission is stepping in on a formal recall.
Samsung is now offering an exchange program after a recall for the Galaxy Note 7.
Samsung stopped selling the Note 7 earlier this month due to a battery cell issue after reports of devices catching fire.
When announcing the official recall last week, CPSC chairman Elliot Kaye said that it was not ideal to have companies go off on their own to deal with serious product defects. Samsung plans to resume new sales of the Note 7 in South Korea on 28 September.
Consumers can replace their Note 7 with a new one or can exchange with Galaxy S7 or S7 edge.
The recall comes as Samsung is locked in a fierce battle with Apple for the attentions of high-end smartphone buyers.
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About a quarter of affected phones had been exchanged in the United States by Tuesday, according to a spokeswoman for Samsung’s USA subsidiary.
