Last year, Samsung had to recall its Galaxy Note 7 flagship phone after some users began reporting that the device was spontaneously bursting into flames.
The exercise cost the company over $1 billion and hurt its share prices at the time. But it clearly didn’t do enough damage to keep Samsung from thinking about relaunching the device for fans in its home market of South Korea.
The Wall Street Journal reports that the company is set to launch a ‘Fandom Edition’ (FE) model on July 7 for $616 (700,000 South Korean Won). About 400,000 handsets will go on sale next month in South Korea, while other countries will get smaller inventories.
The FE is really just a refurbished Note 7 with different internal components than the original; Samsung noted in March that it planned to recycle all returned devices into fully functioning devices. And to be fair, the Note 7 might indeed be worth resurrecting – it received glowing reviews, including one from our own Napier Lopez, and the company made plenty of money even after the recall fiasco. Clearly, there’s still money to be made from selling it.
Hopefully, we won’t hear of explosions and fires this time around. In January, the company published a report detailing two issues with the initial batches of the Note 7, both of which concerned the phone’s battery and caused it to short circuit.
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