Samsung recently launched its Galaxy Note 7 flagship, and although both the public and reviewers have commended the device, it looks like the smartphone packs some nasty surprises.
Keep in mind that the Galaxy Note 7 comes with a gorgeous design, a curved display, high performance specs, 64 GB of expandable internal space and a premium-level camera to boot. It also packs a high number of neat features, some of which we highlighted in our coverage.
So, what gives?
A myriad of reports indicate that the dream phone is one of the risky investments on the market right now. Only days after it was released, the handset started to behave erratically, as users point out. Forums are filled with complaints of the Note 7 crashing, entering never-ending boot loops or simply bricking completely.
Android forums, such as XDA Developers, report that the issue appears only days after the device is unboxed. What is more worrisome, no reason or causality seems to be linked to the crashes. The problem tends to debut with a boot loop.
Some users have suggested that forcing the phone into safe or recovery modes could assist in fixing it, but it only makes matters worse. Note 7 owners said that the device suffers from random crashes, which can lead to a complete bricking of their handset.
PhoneArena says that its device crashed in Recovery mode, and then jumped right into a long-standing boot loop. The experts from the tech website point out that nothing helped, although they tried to reset the device to factory settings and wipe the cache. The fact that no user-accessible method seems to help might indicate that we are dealing with a hardware issue.
Some users went to certified Samsung stores to have their devices looked at, and in many cases Samsung representatives could only replace their devices with new ones.
Among the pile of ill news, a pattern seems to be emerging. It looks like the only Note 7 owners who encountered issues are the ones who bought the international Exynos variant of the handset. This could mean two things: we could be seeing an Exynos-exclusive problem, or users with a crashing Note 7 in the United States did not complain about it over forums, which is very unlikely.
So far, Samsung has not made any official comment on the situation.
Until the company addresses the problem, we would advise smartphone fans to wait before spending a big portion of their savings on a potentially unstable Galaxy Note 7.
Should you already own the latest stylus-carrying flagship from Samsung, we are curious about your experience with it. Let us know in the comments section below.
