WhereIsAtlas · Samsung

Where Is the Galaxy Note 7 Now?

It was a 2016 flagship, it overheated and caught fire, and it was recalled twice before being discontinued — the rare device that ended its life as a safety notice rather than an old model.

The Galaxy Note 7 was withdrawn while it was still the current model, after batteries overheated and caught fire. Samsung's own investigation put the cause on the batteries. The phone did not become obsolete; it was removed.

A phone that failed in the only way that matters

Most products fail commercially. They sell badly, they are ignored, and eventually they are quietly replaced by something better. That is a slow, survivable kind of failure.

The Galaxy Note 7 failed a different way. Units overheated and caught fire [1]. A phone that catches fire is not a bad product in the sense a slow-selling phone is a bad product — it is a hazard, and a hazard cannot be left on the market while the next version is developed.

What actually happened

The sequence matters more than any single event. The device was recalled. It was recalled again. And then it was discontinued rather than reissued [2]. Each step is a normal instrument of consumer protection; run in sequence over one model, they amount to an execution.

The question everyone asked at the time was why. Samsung's answer came in January 2017, when the company published findings that attributed the fires to battery defects [1][3]. The finding was carried the same week by Korean and Japanese business press — 동아일보 and 日経クロステック among them [4][5][6] — which matters for a Korean manufacturer's product: the conclusion is not only what an English-language wire reported, it is what the press in the company's own market, and its neighbour's, reported at the time. That is the company investigating its own product and naming the component — the least defensive version of the response available, and the reason this entry can state a cause at all rather than describing a mystery.

Where is the Note 7 now?

Nowhere, and that is the point. There is no used market of any scale, no collector's niche of the kind that forms around discontinued consoles, and no second life as a budget handset in another territory. A device recalled for catching fire does not get a nostalgic revival.

What survives is the reference. The Note 7 is now the example people reach for when they need to explain what a recall that goes badly looks like — not a company that made a mistake, but a product that could not be allowed to continue. The Note name did return on later models. This phone did not.

That is why it is filed as defunct and not as retired. Retired means a product reached the end of a normal life. The Note 7 was ended.

What this entry does not claim

A total cost figure. Samsung's recall was widely costed, but the figure could not be verified in the sources used here, and a number attached to the wrong noun is worse than no number. No amount is stated.

Exact sale and recall dates. The sources establish 2016, the recall and the discontinuation, and this entry does not give specific days or a precise number of weeks on sale.

That every unit was affected, or how many. The entry describes a defect that led to a recall, not an incidence rate. Nothing here implies a proportion of devices.

That the batteries were the only factor. Samsung's investigation attributed the fires to battery defects [1][3]. That is what the sources say; this entry does not add or subtract causes on its own authority.

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More from the files

Sources

  1. Samsung blames Galaxy Note 7 fires on faulty batteries — Al Jazeera (2026-10-25) ↩
  2. Note 7 fires: Samsung blames batteries — Gulf News (2026-10-25) ↩
  3. Samsung identify what took the Note 7 down — ChannelNews (2026-10-25) ↩
  4. 갤노트7 발화 원인은 배터리 결함 (Samsung: Note 7 fire cause is a battery defect) — 동아일보 (Donga Ilbo) (2026-10-25) ↩
  5. Galaxy Note 7 の発火原因を発表 (Samsung announces the cause of the Note 7 fires) — 日経クロステック (Nikkei xtech) (2026-10-25) ↩
  6. サムスン、Galaxy Note 7 の発火はバッテリーが原因と発表 — ASCII.jp (2026-10-25) ↩
  7. Samsung says battery was main cause of Galaxy Note 7 fires — Korea JoongAng Daily (2026-10-25)