[Note 7 Questions & Answers] notjames:
Here's my take. Samsung has never once called it a mandatory recall. They've ALWAYS said it was voluntary, which is quite confusing to me. Secondly, it's the carriers that determine whether cell service can be blocked to the phone or not. So it's the carriers that are forcing that if they are. I'm with Sprint. They are saying they will update the OS so that it will no longer hold a charge causing the phone to not be mobile anymore. Meh. We'll see. If Sprint turns the service off to my phone, I'm going to have some strongly worded email going out to them demanding reimbursement for the cell service I pay for. They can't turn my service off while I'm paying for it or that would be theft; recall or not; especially since it's still officially a voluntary recall.

Now, my $.02 on the whole battery exploding thing is this. I think it's a hoax. It has to be. Let me be more specific, the fact that it was a "huge issue" does not jive. It wasn't, in reality, a huge issue, or at least I never saw any evidence of it being one. Samsung couldn't reproduce it. Heck, they couldn't even fix the problem with the roll out of the "fixed" devices suggesting that they never could "find the problem" suggesting that there probably never was a problem. Now, the conspiracy theorist in me thinks about all of the other phone manufacturers delivering their latest and greatest just after the release of the Note 7 IE Apple, LG. It wouldn't take a lot to pay a few people to purchase a Note 7 and do something to it to cause it to "explode" in order to prepare to release the competition. I also find it quite suspicious that:

1. out of the millions of phones sold, an extremely tiny fraction of Note 7s were reported actually "exploded"

2. out of that tiny fraction, they all started "exploding" around the same time

3. even after the initial replacement, the "affected" fixed phones all exploded around the same time

4. the major recall happened

5. explosions immediately stopped.

6. i7 is released

7. V20 is released

8. no explosions reported since

And you KNOW at least thousands perhaps tens of thousands of people still have Note 7s in the wild and yet no more explosions. Something's fishy to me.

My observations about the way this "explosion" thing came to be is this: I noticed with my Note7 that if I plugged the USB-C in upside down (meaning the metal mesh of the usb connector was facing toward the front of the phone when plugged in), my battery would sometimes heat up. It never exploded and it never got so hot that I couldn't hold the phone. In fact, my Note 3 got just as hot when charging at times, too. If I reseated the USB-C cable so that the mesh was facing the back of the phone, no such heating occurred. I was able to reliably reproduce this with my phone (I sent an email to Samsung, but never received a reply). It wouldn't take much scheming to think of a way to sabotage the sale of the greatest phone by causing the phone to "explode" and then make a media frenzy about it. Samsung handled it the right way, imo. That said, when one considers that exploding phones haven't happened since the recall (as far as I have heard or know), everyone claiming to "be responsible" can stuff it.

My biggest hope is this: someone please help me find a way to bypass the locked bootloader on my SN-930P so that I can root/mod it and get past the stupidity of my provider. I've had my phone since August (literally got it the day it was released in the US). I've had no problems with it. This phone is hands-down the best smart phone to ever be released and I use the S-pen all the time!!! That's the one thing I must have!