Announced in March, and then put on the market in April, Samsung’s flagship smartphone, the Galaxy S4, has been out for a solid six months. According to the German publication MobiFlip, one of their “trusted sources” who works at an operator says that they’re experiencing a flood of support requests for the device’s battery. Apparently as many as 30% of Galaxy S4 units that were sold are either experiencing batteries that are dramatically losing their capacity to hold a charge, or even worse, the batteries are swelling.
There are two obvious statements to make here. First, Samsung couldn’t have predicted this with the type of testing they do since the problem seemed to only manifest itself after half a year. Second, if Samsung wants to prove themselves as being a company that cares, they should immediately put up a website where anyone, anywhere, can simply type in their address and have a battery sent to them free of charge. Yes, some people will abuse the system, but the good PR will outweigh the costs associated with pumping out a few extra batteries at the factory. Is this embarrassing? Well, for now this appears to be a problem limited to one country, which makes me think that Samsung simply shipped a bad batch of batteries. This has happened to nearly every tech company, including Sony, Dell, and even Apple, though admittedly those defective batteries were in laptops, not smartphones. Anyway, this will be fun to watch.
