AT&T stops Samsung phone exchanges after new fire reports

Meanwhile, Samsung is working hard on its upcoming flagship, the Galaxy S8, in an attempt to put the whole Note 7 recall behind it.

According to a report by The Verge, AT&T will take all Samsung Galaxy Note7 off the shelves and will no longer exchange old Note7s for replacements Note7s or sell the device.

Samsung said it is looking into the issue, while the federal agency handling the original recall, the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission, said it “is moving expeditiously to investigate” whether there are any issues with the replacement devices it had previously approved. Samsung officially recalled the phones last month, blaming faulty batteries for overheating the phones and causing them to ignite.

All major mobile carriers in the USA are offering exchanges for Note 7s. Now, there are local reports of more replacement smartphones catching fire or smoking. If the text message received by Klering was indeed from a Samsung representative, things may not go so well for the company and it may even be forced to issue a second recall of its flagship phablet. On Saturday, Michael Klering, a Kentucky resident, said his exchanged Note 7 phone caught fire. Instead, customers can hand over their Note 7 for another device. AT&T, a major phone retailer, encouraged customers with Note 7 phones to exchange them for other products.

The evidence suggests that Samsung rushed its phone into production, was slow to issue a recall, and now appears to be suppressing the information that replacements are unsafe.

It comes after another replacement Note 7 caught fire on a Southwest Airlines plane on Wednesday.

This will certainly put a dent in Samsung’s overall Note 7 sales.

Now we have yet another alarming story, of a Kentucky man who woke up in the middle of the night to a hissing sound and smoke-filled room.

Tech Times reported a Samsung Note 7 exploded in Taiwan while the owner was out walking her dog. The phablet device had previously seen a massive and unprecedented recall of roughly 300,000-500,000 units. I’m not even sure that Samsung will recover reputation-wise given that they’re now on strike two of something that shouldn’t have even had a strike one. “Samsung needs to do something to get these off the market”, Klering said. For now, it appears modest. The explosion issue on the Galaxy Note 7 did not only hurt Samsung’s high running revenues, it also hit Samsung right in the back with the company’s reputation and its trust among the users. Sales, though, are falling to 49 trillion won, or $44 billion, down 5% from a year earlier.