Want China Times, Staff Reporter 2013-10-23
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| Samsung's new smartphone, the Galaxy Round, at an telecom fair in Seoul on Oct. 10, 2013. (Photo/Xinhua) |
China's
national broadcaster CCTV has launched a scathing attack on electronics giant
Samsung, claiming serious flaws in the South Korean company's Galaxy smartphone
line.
Experts
interviewed during CCTV's Half-hour Economy program on Oct. 22 said popular
Samsung products such as the Galaxy Note and the Galaxy S series contain design
flaws including problems with the memory chips. Such hardware faults can cause
the phone to shut down unexpectedly, prevent users from turning the phone back
on, and cost 800 to 2,000 yuan (US$130-$325) each time the phone is taken in
for repairs, one expert said.
Samsung's
Galaxy S3, released last May, sold more than a million handsets in 50 days and
became the world's most popular smartphone with 18 million units sold in the
third quarter of 2012 alone.
A young
university graduate interviewed by the program said she spent 4,180 yuan
(US$685) on a Galaxy S3 in September last year and less than nine months later
the phone started exhibiting problems such as switching off by itself when she
tried to answer calls. When she took the phone to a Samsung service center for
repairs she was told the issue was caused by conflicting applications but the
problem remained after she formatted the phone as suggested.
Half a year
later, the woman said, her phone was "dying" as often as 20 to 30
times a day, sometimes only a couple of minutes apart. Every time she took the
phone in for repairs she was told the same thing, but despite formatting her
phone three times she saw no improvement, prompting her to seek an independent
repair center which quickly told her that a faulty memory chip on the
motherboard was to blame. The staff member at the repair center added that this
has been a common problem with Samsung phones and attributed it to design
flaws.
After
conducting some online research, the smartphone user found 817 posts on
microblogs and at least six groups on Tencent's QQ messaging service about
Samsung's memory chip issues. Most of the complaints belonged to owners of
Galaxy Note or S series smartphones, with many saying that their smartphone
eventually "bricked" after repeated shutdowns. Fearing the same would
happen to her phone, the woman said she took it back to a Samsung service
center again but was repeatedly told that her issue was merely a software — as
opposed to hardware — problem.
CCTV also
contacted a smartphone repair center which said that they received 13 phones in
September with the same chip problem, which accounted for around 20% of all
phones sent in for repairs. It is normally a rare problem that occurs in around
one in 200 phones, one staff member said, but it appears to be a much more
common occurrence with Samsung models.
A Samsung
spokesperson told the program that the company is aware that portion of its
initial batch of Galaxy S3 and Galaxy Note 2 models have encountered memory
problems and suggested users experiencing issues should contact their nearest
Samsung service center to have their firmware updated free of charge.
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