2016 just won't go away peacefully for Samsung Electronics.
Months after the Korean tech giant had to recall and later stop production entirely for the Samsung Galaxy Note 7, it is staring at another major issue right in the face.
Someone just posted a story in the Consumerist saying the camera lens of his Galaxy S7 suddenly shattered. A certain Sean expressed his dismay upon waking up one day and finding his Galaxy S7's camera glass was not how it was when he left the night before.
Sean bought the smartphone recently and is just a little over a week old. On Dec. 22, he left his new Galaxy S7 in its case and on top of his nightstand before he dozed off. Come Friday morning, he discovered that the camera glass on his new phone was broken.
Sean described the camera glass' damage resembled "a miniature bullet hole".
The man did the logical thing to do.
Sean called Samsung to report the incident. He was expecting the company to offer a replacement as he considers the damage as a factory defect and being barely a week old at the time, the phone was still under warranty. To his dismay, Samsung insisted that it was not liable for the damage as it believes Sean was responsible for the shattered glass.
Obviously, the man was disappointed and angry.
He turned to the internet for help. While doing his research, he discovered that he was not the only one with a similar predicament as more people experienced having their Galaxy S7's lens breaking on its own.
Same complaints, same response from Samsung.
Ironically, a lot of people have posted their complaints on the Samsung community forum. Apparently, the complaints are not enough to warrant Samsung's attention. In each case Sean read, the response of Samsung was all the same: the customer caused the damage, therefore the company is not liable.
Forbes cited the response of a Samsung representative in its report:
"We do see there are quite a few interesting theories, and although we cannot speculate on each individual's situation, we would like to assure you that Samsung does take many different conditions into consideration when constructing our devices."
Kudos for saying it does know there are complaints but the rep followed that up with something that may not sit well with the complainants.
"Although some unforeseen things may come, we do believe this is an isolated occurrence and do not want to place blame on anyone."
Two things.
The company is not blaming anyone but it tells every complainant that it will not honor the warranty because it is not Samsung's fault. So who's at fault? By the process of cancellation... well, you know.
Number two. This is not an isolated case. How many incidents does it take to move from being an isolated one to a problem of gigantic proportion? Remember, a zombie pandemic starts with a single bite.
This is another classic case of the customer not being right. After the debacle that Samsung has gone through this year, it should have wisened up by now and treat this supposed non-existent problem as a major one before it explodes in their faces.
The problem with the Galaxy Note 7 started off on a small scale. The first few incidents of exploding batteries did not warrant much attention from the company. It was only when more cases were reported and proof has surfaced that Samsung finally acted upon the problem. And even after addressing the issue with replacement batteries, the problem just did not want to go away.
