The second quarter of 2016 is a period that Samsung can’t put behind it soon enough. The company was in great spirits going into August, and why wouldn’t it be? Samsung was about to launch the Galaxy Note 7, the sleekest and most impressive phablet the world had ever seen. The launch went well, the Galaxy Note 7 reviews were outstanding, but then things took a turn for the worse: A battery defect caused some Note 7 handsets to explode while charging.
Things are finally beginning to settle now that Samsung’s unprecedented smartphone recall is well underway, and the company on Thursday offered a status update to let the world know how far along it is in its efforts to replace every potentially dangerous Note 7 that had been sold.
MUST SEE: No one is talking about the game-changing new iPhone 7 Plus feature coming in iOS 10.1
In an update posted to its China market website on Thursday morning, Samsung said that more than 1 million people around the world are now using “safe” Galaxy Note 7 handsets with batteries that are not in danger of exploding. That figure includes all Note 7 smartphones that were issued as replacements for affected phones, as well as units that were initially sold in China, since they were not equipped with batteries from the plant that produced the problematic power cells.
“Currently, the brand new Note 7 products that have been swapped in overseas markets are using identical batteries to those that were supplied and used for the Chinese version,” Samsung told Reuters.
Over 1 million safe Note 7 handsets it a big milestone, but Samsung isn’t quite out of the woods just yet. Aside from the hundreds of thousands of potentially dangerous devices that Samsung has yet to swap, there are new reports emerging that some “safe” Note 7 units still have problems with overheating batteries. What’s more, Samsung is also investigating a growing number of reports that some of its washing machines have exploded while in use.
