On Thursday the company formally recalled the device in conjunction with the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission, the agency charged with overseeing safety-related product issues.
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The CPSC’s official recall page notes that roughly 1 million Galaxy Note 7 units sold prior to Thursday, September 15 are being recalled.
Despite the risk of fire or explosion, the vast majority of Samsung Galaxy Note 7 owners in the USA have been holding onto their devices.
Faced with the threat perceptions of the user and Samsung to reduce this effect does not (unless they end devices) is everything. The new Note 7 will be in most stores no later than September 21, Samsung said Thursday.
The CPSC said Thursday that the Note 7 has been linked to 92 incidents of overheating in the US, including 26 reports of burns and 55 accounts of property damage.
The US notice affects around one million of the global total of 2.5 million handsets being recalled, which has cast a cloud over the South Korean electronics giant and world’s largest smartphone vendor.
The Department of Transportation on Thursday also ordered airline passengers not to bring Samsung Galaxy Note7 phones on planes unless they keep them turned off and don’t charge them during the flight. Remember these 92 cases are in the USA only, so there are likely many more that have been reported globally.
Samsung’s own guidance about what consumers should do with the phones has been confusing.
Good sales of the Samsung Galaxy S7 and S7 edge helped push the company to its highest profits in two years, after several quarters of slowing growth in the smartphone market.
Since then, Samsung has urged customers to turn off the phone and contact their carrier or Samsung to get a free replacement.
CPSC chairman Elliot Kaye on a call with reporters said that companies should not try to do a recall alone.
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The recall came at a particularly bad time for Samsung. “As we’ve seen from videos … the phones really do present a serious fire hazard”.
