Gadgetory

it's official the Galaxy Note 7 is dead samsung has finally pulled the plug on the note 7 with a second recall telling all owners even those with replacements to shut off the phone and exchange it for a different model the company has permanently stopped production of the premium phone that's prone to Catching Fire the nightmare of recalling two and a half million phones globally escalated into a mortifying disaster for the brand after so-called safe replacement models also started catching fire even though the phone is dead the drama isn't over yet customers now have to deal with the headache of getting refunds or getting carriers to exchange the phone again the whole recall also raises some big questions that Samsung still has to answer for starters what is the source of the battery fire malfunction after the first recall Samsung pinned the blame on a production error from one battery supplier but there are doubts over that reasoning when safe replacement phones still had the problem even though they had batteries from a different source was the rush to produce batteries quickly the cause for more errors at a different factory there's another layer to the mystery several note 7 phones in China also caught fire even though the Chinese models were said to have batteries from a different supplier for consumers to trust Samsung again the South Korean company needs to break down exactly what went wrong and what steps it is taking to avoid this from happening in the future there's also a question of how much damage this has done to Samsung financially some analysts have estimated to Reuters that it could cost the company as much as 17 billion dollars and then there's the matter of repairing consumer trust Wilke samsung ever make a no date or is this disaster so bad that it won't make anything called a note again there's still a large fan base for these larger note models if you have a note 7 write to me share your experience or what phone you're trading it in for or if you're going to hang on to it I hope you don't but some people have already commented on our Facebook page that they want to still use the potentially explosive phone please that's it for this tech news update I'm Bridget Carey you can stay on top of the biggest stories at cnet.com slash