With more than 30 million units sold worldwide, Samsung's Galaxy S3 is continuing its wonderful run in the mobile phone market. However, there seems to be a mysterious illness the popular product is affected with of late. More and more users are seen complaining about what they call a "Galaxy S3 Sudden Death" during which the devices are crashing and not rebooting without any specific reason or warning.
There appears to be a large number of users affected with this issue. A post on Reddit, which currently has more than 165 comments, pointed towards a thread over at XDA Developers forum entitled "Ultimate GS3 sudden death thread." The thread, started just over a month ago, has over 68 pages and 665 posts at the time of this reporting. In most of the cases, the flagship product from Samsung gave up in about 150-200 days after activation without any warning signs. "It has also been noted that the affected handsets don't respond to any hard rebooting processes and has no bias towards rooting on manufacturer's standard hardware," a Redmond Pie report said.
"Went to bed, left phone on charge, woke to the green "fully charged" light, but no response to buttons. Pulled the battery to make it reboot, and now nothing. Neither download nor recovery modes, no charging light, nothing. It's off for repairs," a user named "UncleBeer" posted on the XDA developers forum.
Reddit user TurtleRecall speculated that the reason behind devices being bricked out might possibly be due to a corrupted NAND memory on the affected Galaxy S3 units. Here is how the user summarized the problem:
"The XDA thread has 56 pages (so far) of people whose main boards have suddenly died. The devices seem to last between 150 and 200 days before failing. Samsung are replacing them under warranty whether or not people have rooted the devices or installed non-standard firmware.
There's speculation that the NAND is becoming corrupted and failing. Worryingly, Samsung are replacing the main boards with the same revision so this may just be putting the problem off for another 6 months or so.
It happened to my S3 last week and I've never rooted or installed anything other than the official 3UK Samsung firmware, first ICS then JB. Samsung haven't officially acknowledged that there's an issue, but both the guy I spoke to in the authorised repair centre and the chap in the Samsung warranty call centre have said they've seen this issue a lot lately.
Tl;Dr - S3 main boards dying for no reason, Samsung replacing main boards for free, but no new hardware revision so it might just happen again."
Samsung is apparently aware of the issue, although it is yet to make a formal comment on the anomaly. However, the South Korean tech giant is reportedly replacing main boards of all the affected devices under the product warranty with no questions asked.
