Just as we are approaching the final run-in to the wonderful festive season where everything should be all about smiles and joyful memories, it seems that a mysterious illness has started affecting Samsung’s wonderful Android powered Galaxy S III smartphone. We all know how great the S III is, with it widely being regarded as the best Android device currently available on the market, but a rising number of users are reporting that their beloved Samsung smartphones are starting to give up and die with no prior warning or reason given for their digital suicide.
Discussions on various technology based forums have seen S III users report that their phones give up the will to live 150-200 days after activation, with no warning signs being visible before it turns into an expensive doorstopper. Rather concerningly, it has also been noted that the affected handsets don’t respond to any hard rebooting processes and has no bias towards rooting on manufacturer’s standard hardware. The good news does seem to be that Samsung is doing the righteous thing and replacing all of the affected devices under the product warranty without asking any questions.
Conjecture around the online community has pointed toward the NAND memory being corrupted for some reason, leading to a complete failure and a bricked device. As part of the repair or replace process under the warranty, Samsung is actually replacing the mainboard in the device with one of the same model and revision, leading some to speculate that it is nothing more than a stop-gap procedure that will ultimately lead the device to the same fate in a few months time.
Although Samsung is actively replacing all devices that have suffered from this complete breakdown and are obviously aware of the situation, they have yet to make any official statement about whether or not this is a known issue with a specific component within the Galaxy S III or if something else is to blame for this problem occurring. Considering there doesn’t seem to be any pattern to the breakdowns or any mitigating circumstances that actually cause the S IIIs to fail, it looks like it is pretty impossible to prevent it from happening. Fingers crossed that our readers don’t suffer the same issue with their Galaxy S III.
(via PhoneArena)
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