Samsung Galaxy SIII Sudden Death in New Zealand: your rights

Over the last couple of months we started seeing a trend in our Geekzone forums: more and more people who bought Samsung Galaxy SIII smartphones being affected by the Samsung Sudden Death. But the worrying part of this trend was really the number of times people reported their handsets coming back from the repair service with a "no warranty repair" tag, saying the user must have tampered with the ROM on the phone.

The Samsung Galaxy SIII Sudden Death is a well known problem and Samsung is quiet about it. Basically you are using your phone and with no reason at all it freezes. You can't turn it off, you can't do anything except take the battery out.

The boot might show something like this:

ODIN MODE
PRODUCT NAME:
CUSTOM BINARY DOWNLOAD: No
CURRENT BINARY: Samsung Official
SYSTEM STATUS: Custom

The "SYSTEM STATUS" shows customs because the NAND memory is corrupt and it can't read the product name or system partition therefore it defaults to 'SYSTEM STATUS: Custom'.

According to a discussion on XDA:

The following ROMs include a Kernel, bootloader and recovery with the Update 7 "Fixes" applied. If you have one of these, officially consider yourself "Safe". If you rooted one of the below stock ROMs, you will also be safe, however - if you changed to a custom kernel or recovery, you need to look at the below custom sections. If you have never rooted, the stock section is all you need read.

As It appears all 4.1.2 kernels have the fixes, there is no longer a need to test them all. See below for a list of tested kernels that have the fix. All kernels subsequent to these will also be regarded as safe.

• XXELKC
• XXELL1
• XXELL4
• XXELL5
• XXELL6
• XXELLA
• XXELLB
• XXELLC

People who have never rooted need not read any further. Essentially, if you have an official, never rooted 4.1.2 ROM, you're "safe"

You can check your handset by running eMMC Brickbug Check. At this moment there isn't firm information if this is really just a firmware issue or a hardware problem with some batches of the memory used on these handsets.

We read reports of people on Geekzone saying that repair services denied warranty repair claiming the phone was modified based on this system status, even if there was no modification at all.

If you get this kind of response, do not settle. Take the handset back to the retailer where you got it from and make sure they understand this is a known fault. You do not have to deal with Samsung as under the Consumer Guarantees Act this is what retailers have to do. Make it clear it's a problem that Samsung is aware of and it must be repaired under warranty.