Alleged photos of the refurbished Galaxy Note 7 appear

We long suspected that Samsung would eventually try to refurbish and resell old Galaxy Note 7 units. We kept asking and they kept denying it, but a couple of weeks ago Samsung finally came clean and confirmed they would indeed breathe new life into the Note 7. Now we’re getting our first look at one of the refurb units in Vietnam.

Not surprisingly, the phone looks exactly the same on the outside, with a model number of SM-N935. As the rumors correctly predicted, the new Note 7 has a slightly smaller 3,200 mAh battery instead of the 3,500 mAh found in the original. The photos show it running Android 7.0 with a firmware and kernel build date from February 2017.

My eyes, and Vietnamese language skills, aren’t what they could be, but if these images are from yesterday – Friday, 7 April – that would be Thứ sáu, 7 Tháng tư in Vietnamese, we could be seeing an abbreviation of that on the lock screen. The imminent re-release of a refurbished Galaxy Note 7 now looks to be right on our doorstep, although we’ve been told that the phone will not be sold in the US, Canada or India and as yet we have no pricing information.

From an environmental and financial perspective it makes a lot of sense for Samsung to try to resell the millions of recalled Note 7 units. While they will obviously have had extreme quality assurance testing done on them, for many the whole idea will seem…off. If even one of these refurb units catches fire – as smartphones occasionally do – then Samsung is going to have a massive PR headache on its hands. Again.

Do you think the risk is worth it? Would you buy a refurbished Note 7?