Despite the numerous warnings by government agencies and also incentives provided by Samsung to return the Galaxy Note 7, there are still quite a few customers out there are still holding onto their phones. In some parts of the world like Hong Kong, retailers are continuing to sell the device to the public.However it seems that kind of behavior won’t fly in New Zealand. The country’s carriers has officially announced that they will be blacklisting the Note 7. This was confirmed by the New Zealand Telecommunications Forum (TCF) CEO Geoff Thorn, in which it basically means that the phones will be rendered unusable on any of New Zealand’s networks, thus turning the Note 7 into an expensive and potentially dangerous paperweight.
The good news is that for the most part, most of the phones have since been returned, but apparently there are still a few hundred devices left in the wild. In a post on the forums it reads, “Numerous attempts by all providers have been made to contact owners and ask them to bring the phones in for replacement or refund.”
The blacklist is expected to come into effect on the 18th of November, so if you know anyone in New Zealand still holding onto the handset, you might want to ask them to send it back in before the 18th of November if they’d rather not be inconvenienced by suddenly discovering that they own a phone that does not make or receive phone calls and SMS.
Filed in . Read more about Galaxy Note 7 and Samsung.
