Samsung has confirmed that its Galaxy Note 7 smartphone will officially go on sale in South Africa on 11 November. It was originally meant to land in late September… but then, well, you know the story. Exploding phones, recalls, and the general sort of bedlam tech companies fear most.
The Korean electronics giant is at pains to reassure consumers the devices that’ll be in stores next month are utterly devoid of the battery gremlins that befell the first iterations of the new phablet. “These devices are completely safe to use and present no battery cell issues,” says Craige Fleischer, director of integrated mobility at Samsung South Africa.
Three specific software changes affecting the battery indication have been made for extra reassurance. “The new Galaxy Note 7 features a green battery icon that’s visible on the Status Bar, the Always On Display screen and the Power Off prompt screen — accessed by long-pressing the power key. Additionally, users can easily verify that they’re using the latest Galaxy Note7 by looking for a square symbol on the label of the phone’s packaging,” the company says in a release sent to the South African media on Wednesday afternoon.
Woes aside, we’ve been pretty excited by the Note 7’s impressive specs list. The 5.7in, curved QHD Super AMOLED display is beautiful, the S Pen is now as waterproof as the Note 7 itself (and can’t be reinserted into the storage slot on the device the wrong way — something that bedeviled its predecessor), and iris-scanning promises to make it easier to pretend we’re in Demolition Man (without the fountain pen bit, hopefully).
Reassurances aside, the question remains how many users who were holding out for the Note 7 have since decided on another device. It’s unlikely that Android loyalists due an upgrade in recent months would’ve jumped ship for the iPhone 7 Plus — which goes on sale locally in just over a week — but for those who were wavering between the two big platforms the iPhone must be very tempting indeed.
