Samsung has been pushing pretty hard to get customers to return the Samsung Galaxy Note 7 handsets. They’ve offered incentives like discounts, and also made the returns process easier by setting up return booths at airports, but yet there still remains a small number of Note 7 handsets out there.
Recently Samsung Canada announced that they will be deactivate unreturned Note 7 handsets, and a report from The Verge has revealed that Samsung could be doing the same for the US soon by remotely pushing an update that will effectively kill the handset. This is according to a message that one Note 7 user on US Cellular apparently received, in which it said, “As of December 15th, Samsung will modify the software to prevent the Galaxy Note 7 from charging. The phone will no longer work.”
This sounds a bit different from what Samsung has done in other countries, in which the company pushed out updates that limited the battery charge to 60%. From this message, it sounds like the Note 7 handsets in the US won’t even be able to charge at all, let alone hit the 60% maximum mark.
Both Samsung and US Cellular have declined to comment on the message, but we guess it shouldn’t be too surprising. Over in New Zealand and Australia, local carriers have already blacklisted the handsets from operating on their networks, effectively turning them into expensive and dangerous paperweights, which we can only imagine will motivate customers into returning them.
Filed in . Read more about Galaxy Note 7 and Samsung.
