Oliver Haslam on September 20, 2016, 9:17 am

Rumors Of ‘Boring’ iPhone 7 Led To Samsung Galaxy Note 7’s Self-Destruction [Report]

Another day, another story about Samsung’s Galaxy Note 7, although this one fortunately does not include any smartphones catching fire or blowing up, so we should probably be thankful for small mercies.

It does, however, include a smartphone company desperate to get one over Apple. So desperate, it is claimed, that the Galaxy Note 7 was rushed to market, leading to the now familiar story of handsets with defective batteries causing untold havoc the world over.

The story itself comes from Bloomberg, which claims that Samsung got wind of Apple’s iPhone 7 possibly based on rumors doing the rounds on the Internet that it would not include a newly redesigned chassis or any hardware improvements that would get the pulse racing. While the impressive A10 chip and the iPhone 7 Plus’ dual-lens camera setup are of significant interest to those who like that kind of thing, to outsiders the new iPhones are both a bit too familiar, and Samsung wanted to build on that.

According to the Bloomberg story, Samsung wanted to take advantage of Apple’s lacklustre iPhone 7 by pushing everything it could think of into the Galaxy Note 7, bringing features to the table which had been on the device’s roadmap for some time.

This, claims Bloomberg, led to the Galaxy Note 7 being rushed to release, potentially causing the quality control issues the device is now experiencing.

After a select group of top managers got their hands on early versions of the Note, they gushed over the upgrades and praised each other’s work, according to one of the people. If Apple wasn’t going to offer consumers anything exciting, Samsung certainly would.

With Chairman Lee in the hospital, the younger Lee and co-vice chairman G.S. Choi huddled with Koh and executives of other Samsung affiliates, which make semiconductors, glass panels and batteries. They went ahead with a slew of new features that had been on the company’s product road map, including an improved screen and stylus—and then approved a launch date 10 days earlier than last year, according to one of the people familiar with the matter.

It’s important to reiterate that if you have bought a Galaxy Note 7, you must return it to Samsung for a replacement or a full refund. You can find details on how you can go about doing that in our previous post here: Galaxy Note 7 Recall: How To Return It To Verizon, T-Mobile, Samsung, Others.

(Source: Bloomberg)