Newsletter
In short: A Long Island woman filed a lawsuit against Samsung Electronics, alleging that her new Galaxy Note 9 spontaneously caught fire earlier this month, leaving her panicking in an elevator. The American branch of the South Korean firm acknowledge the receipt of the litigation and said it’s currently investigating the claim, maintaining that this is the first report of its latest flagship — released three weeks ago — being faulty in any way. Until further notice, Samsung is denying any wrongdoing and suspects the device that ended up combusting was either mishandled or was otherwise damaged in a manner that doesn’t imply a more widespread issue. “Samsung takes customer safety very seriously and we stand behind the quality of the millions of Galaxy devices in use in the United States. We have not received any reports of similar incidents involving a Galaxy Note9 device and we are investigating the matter,” a company spokesperson said in a statement to AndroidHeadlines.
Background: The lawsuit doesn’t fail to mention Samsung’s Galaxy Note 7 fiasco which saw the company lose hundreds of millions of dollars after pulling the plug on the said Android flagship lineup in late 2016 due to widespread reports of the phablet catching fire, melting, and exploding for seemingly no reason. Samsung spent over a year apologizing for the issue and went above and beyond in order to compensate some 2.5 million customers whose devices ended up being recalled, vowing radically improve its quality-assurance practices in order to minimize the chances of such a scenario happening again. These days, the company is mostly ignoring the existence of the Galaxy Note 7 episode in its history but the same QA policy is still in place. The plaintiff, Diane Chung, alleges her Galaxy Note 9 unit started smoking in a moving elevator on September 3, which prompted her to panic and kick it out the moment the elevator stopped. The device stopped smoking after one bystander dropped it in a bucket of water, according to the plaintiff’s account of the accident submitted alongside her lawsuit filed with the Queens Supreme Court.
Impact: Ms. Chung is seeking damages and an order preventing further Galaxy Note 9 sales, with details about the former not being formally submitted, whereas the latter request is extremely unlikely to be granted by any jury given the isolated nature of the incident. While it’s presently unclear how long Samsung‘s own probe into the matter might take, there are no indications that the incident described in the lawsuit is indicative of a more widespread problem with the Galaxy Note 9 lineup.