It will definitely harm the company-as-a-brand, though. People following the news who haven't owned a Samsung phone before might well be put off any Samsung device, ignoring the distinction between the Note and other lines. If it were only about the phone model, the fallout might be much smaller, but it's now become about Samsung's appalling handling of the problems too.

Hell, I owned Galaxy phones for the last 5 years, and even I will be hesitant buying the next Galaxy and will probably wait a few months to see, if any problems show up.

Except that their washing machines are also exploding.

And their SSDs have hardware design flaws making them read slower and slower until the read speed of old cells is down to 1-2megabytes/second... of advertised 550megabytes/s.

Remember that? It affected all Samsung EVO drives, which is marketing speak for all Samsung SLC based drives, which means budget drives, the Pro versions based on MLC were unaffected.

But, the way Samsung handled my case, to deny warranty, and in general case to release an .exe file on their website called "Slow fix something.exe", has me stay away from Samsung SSDs for ever.

The other "fix" they had was to release a firmware which would shuffle data around in the background - reading and rewriting/updating cells - so as to appear that there is no problem - but read speed would anyway decrease with age, and increase the write-cycles on the cells even if the SSD is idle... Fun.

I recommend SanDisk Extreme Pro -- they are awesome good value drives - may exist newer on the market now, but last autumn those were and still are the best SSDs ever.

>which is marketing speak for all Samsung SLC based drives, which means budget drives

Consumer SSDs use MLC. Enterprise SSDs use SLC almost exclusively or eMLC which has less issues than consumer grade MLC.

MLC is about storing multiple bits in a single tiny cell. This results in more capacity at the cost of total write cycles, read errors being more likely and slower read and write speeds.

TLC is MLC but with three bits per cell.

That was just the 840 Evo models, with their 19nm planar TLC NAND.

The 850s use 3D NAND at 40nm process, and in terms of performance and capacity per dollar are pretty much still unmatched.

Huh so EVOs have proven to be not so good?

I haven't kept up with that, I'm still using Samsung 470, 830 and Crucial M4 SSDs, which are rock f&^king solid, knock on wood.

But when they were released, with their much lower price tag, their TLC chips (with a huge SLC buffer to make it seem faster) seemed a bit suspicious - basically cheaper MLC, and that's not a good thing in this case.

As long as it's not their LNG ships... https://www.samsungshi.com/eng/Product/ship_overview.aspx

I see the iPhone 7 as a competitor to the Galaxy S7 (quite a nice phone by the way). The Note range has always been more of a "phablet" than Samsung's flagship line.

It is, however, surprising that they didn't get it right.

Li-ion batteries are seemingly trickier than we consumers assume. Apple had a bit of bad press with the iPhone 4 when batteries starting exploding as well. I thought the industry would have worked it out since then, but according to many of the other comments in this (and other related) threads, Li-ion batteries are still an area of considerable research.

> The Note range has always been more of a "phablet" than Samsung's flagship line.

It's been the power-user line, the most full-featured variant, often more expensive than the Galaxy proper. "Flagship" is a loose term - they probably marketed the Galaxy proper more heavily, but the Note was their top-of-the-range phone, at least for a certain demographic.

True, I'll accept that, in the same way that the iPhone 7 Plus is Apple's flagship phone for certain demographics vs. the iPhone 7 .