Samsung Electronics CEO Kwon Oh-Hyun said on Monday that the company will start selling an improved version of Galaxy note 7 smartphone on July 7 using batteries different from the devices that caused some phones to catch fire earlier this year.
According to CNBC, Samsung will offer more than 300,000 devices, called as the Galaxy Note 7 Fan Edition, in the United States, South Korea, and Canada. The devices will be priced at $600, about 40 percent more than the Note 7's launch price. The new smartphones have been developed from unsealed Note 7 components.
What’s new in the Note 7 phones?
According to Kwon Oh-Hyun, batteries for the new smartphones have a better capacity than that of the original Note 7s and they have passed all safety measures. The tech company was forced to halt sales of the Note 7 back in October 2016, roughly seven weeks after its launch, because of fire-prone batteries from three online suppliers.
Galaxy Note 7 again! Samsung to launch the refurbished phones as speculated https://t.co/2rnvejAmIP pic.twitter.com/vJEUAuD7Zg
— TheNewsGuruNG (@TheNewsGuruNG) March 28, 2017
The incident cost Samsung more than $4 billion in operating loss and ruined its reputation to a great extent, though the company has since recovered with the launch of Galaxy S8.
Samsung Galaxy Note devices
Galaxy Note is a series of Android-based smartphones and high-tech tablets developed and marketed by Samsung Electronics. All models feature note-taking and digital scrapbooking applications, and a pressure-sensitive Wacom digitizer. The most prominent handsets in the series are mentioned below:
- Galaxy Note: While some outlets asked a lot of questions about the viability of the phone because of its 5.3-inch screen, the Galaxy Note received positive comments due to its 1.5 GHz dual-core processor, stylus functionality, and a large screen. By August 2013, the Note sold more than nine million units in the world.
- Note II: This device has been around since 2012, and it features a quad-core processor, a 5.5-inch display, an improved digitizer and split-screen multitasking.
- Note 3: In September 2013, Samsung Electronics officially released the Galaxy Note 3, which had a “premium” body with a 5.7-inch display, a USB 4.0 connector, and other specifications.
- Note 3 Neo: The phone was first released in February 2014, featuring 5.5" Super AMOLED HD display, a 8 MP camera, 16 GB storage, 3 GB of RAM and a quad-core 1.4 GHz Cortex A7 CPU.
In June 2017, Samsung posted its major quarterly net profit in more than five years, although the company came under pressure on wider fronts. Samsung’s vice-chairman Lee Jae-Yong was tasked to launch and market the Note 7 series.