The Samsung Galaxy Note7 disaster was one of the year’s most controversial stories in tech. As you may as well known, the phablet was recalled from the market about two months ago and Samsung has been actively trying to pursue customers to return the remaining units.
But despite Samsung’s efforts, it seems that there are still a lot of Note7 phablets that are currently still in use. Actually according to research firm Apteligent, there are more Note7 units in circulation than there are LG V20s.
Samsung has recently announced it is working hand in hand with the top 4 US carriers in order to send out an update which will eliminate the Galaxy Note7’s ability to charge. T-Mobile will be the first to start rolling out such an update on December 27, while the other carriers will unleash the kill switch come January.
However, it’s quite clear that a lot of Note7 owners aren’t willing to renounce the phablet, event at this late stage. Just look on Reddit, there are dedicated subreddits where people are actively discussing how to ditch the disabling update.
In other countries like the UK, Samsung has been a bit more permissive sending out an update that limits the Galaxy Note7 charging to 30%, thus still letting owners use the device somewhat. So the Apteligent report doesn’t come as a big shock after all.
How does Apteligent get its intel? Well their reports are generated as devices “check in” with the company’s analytics, meaning you’ll need to have an active, working smartphone in order to be taken into account by Apteligent’s statistics.
While Apteligent’s chart is bad news for Samsung, it’s certainly a lot worse for LG. As you can see from the graph, it seems the V20 is barely holding on to dear life.
Despite earlier reports by LG which claimed the company sold 200k V20 units in just 10 days after launch, Aptelgent’s stats beg to differ.
The V20 was actually the first non-Pixel device to make it out into the world with Android 7.0 Nougat out of the box, but that didn’t seem to matter to consumers too much. The V20 features a nice sheet of specs, but maybe the premium price-tag is what deterred users from it. Although we can’t say the same about the Google Pixel or the Note7.
Other handsets present in the charts are the Moto Z, which seems to have lost momentum in recent weeks. Motorola is certainly focused on the Moto Z family, as the company pledged to launch up to 12 new Moto Mods next year. If Motorola keeps its promise, we might see the Moto Z rise in popularity once again.
Interestingly enough, the only phone which seems to be doing great is the Sony Xperia XZ, even better than the Google Pixel, OnePlus 3T and HTC Bolt. It’s no secret that Sony’s mobile division has been struggling to maintain afloat for quite a while now, but according to the Apteligent’s stats there might be hope for the company after all.
