‘The “Superbrick” Nightmare’ Or How Samsung Screwed All Galaxy Note Owners

[Spider]

From A CM Developer – ‘The “Superbrick” Nightmare’ Or How Samsung Screwed All Galaxy Note Owners
By Rajesh Pandey on November 12th, 2012

At the beginning of this year, when Samsung started rolling out the Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich update for the Galaxy Note (N7000), a serious issue was found in the kernel level of the firmware. If any Note owner used the Factory Reset option or wiped the internal storage of his or her device using recovery, the eMMC chip inside the device would die. The issue was present in all the previous leaked ICS firmware for the Galaxy Note, and the community had promptly informed Samsung about the issue after Note owners started bricking their devices left, right and center. The issue was termed as ‘Superbrick’ in the XDA community, since there was no way to bring back these affected devices to life.

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Now, a CyanogenMod developer – Andrew Dodd – has written his story on the ‘superbrick’ issue titled ‘The “Superbrick” Nightmare’ on Google+. The series of posts from Andrew Dodd show the real and harsh truth on how Samsung completely ignored the Superbrick issue, hardly cared about Note owners who had already bricked their devices and the meeting it setup with developers just for the sake of publicity. Worse? The ‘superbrick’ issue eventually found its way to many other Samsung devices even after Samsung knew about it and said that it was “working diligently” on it.

Some of the developers worked hard on finding the root cause of the issue, and even informed Samsung about it. Heck! They even provided Samsung with a workaround to this problem. Even then, in a somewhat shocking behavior, Samsung did not pay any heed to the Android developers and many firmware for other Samsung devices (AT&T and International SGS2) that leaked in the future were found to be plagued by the same kernel-level eMMC killing bug. Even official firmware release from Samsung had the ‘Superbrick’ issue, months after the community informed them about it.

On the flipside, his posts also shows how the Android community worked together to find the root cause of the issue and a fix for it, so as to prevent users from ‘Superbricking’ their devices and extent to which they went to try and save all those Notes that were already superbricked, The hero or the saviour of all the Galaxy Notes and Galaxy S2s out there, however, turned out to be an engineer from Google — Ken — who was later silenced by Samsung. As it turns out, independent Android developers and engineers at Google care more about your devices than Samsung itself does.

It has been more than six months since Samsung was made aware of the ‘superbrick’ issue and it promised that it was “working diligently” on it, and yet till date, the issue persists. Samsung fixed the issue on its newer devices like the Galaxy S3 that never had the issue, but has not made any effort to fix the problem on the device severely affected by it, the Galaxy Note.

Read: The “Superbrick” Nightmare

Samsung, the developers and community have played a large part in making you the largest mobile manufacturer out there. Stop screwing around with them. You are not going to stay at the top forever! HTC and Qualcomm have learnt from their mistakes and are now embrace the open-source community and its developers. Its about time you do the same!

Read more at From A CM Developer - 'The "Superbrick" Nightmare' Or How Samsung Screwed All Galaxy Note Owners - Techie Buzz
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[Astrix]

If you're flasholic or jumping to custom ROMs and kernel , Check and see which is a safe kernel.

Thread from Andrew Dodd a.k.a Entropy512 about kernel/recovery: http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?p=25637220

 

[J515OP]

Does it really surprise anybody that Samsung has taken this attitude? All of these companies have an agenda and if you think they actually care about you then I have a bridge to sell you in Brooklyn. I mean these companies shouldn't go out of their way to mess you over but they don't really care that much either as long as you are buying their new products. Heck they might even see it as incentive for you to buy a new product if your device suddenly becomes a brick. I know we all have favorites whether Google, Microsoft, Apple or Samsung but sometimes issues like this are a reality check.

On the other hand we do have individuals, enthusiast, developers and techies that do care. That is the value of a community such as this forum or a developer forum. More often we can help each other than wait to get help from the big guys. Occasionally we can also raise our voices together to let them know how we feel about neglectful behavior.

 

[idontknow]

I didn't understand anything, it might be because I had a couple of beers,I always drink only one, or it might be because my first languages are Italian and German or it might be just because.....So...what I understood is that Samsung doesn't give any support and I knew that already but I didn't understand what I cannot do to my note if I don't want to brick it!
I'm going to try reading the whole thread again ,I guess :-D
PS.- I understood also that the devs are our angels and if we own a tablet we should always pray for them!

 

[Spider]

I didn't understand what I cannot do to my note if I don't want to brick it!

Hi Gloria. I think the gist of it is: If you have a Galaxy Note (N7000) and it's running Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich and you either use the Factory Reset option or wipe the internal storage using recovery our friends Astrix and JP will recommend the following tool to fix your phablet.

View attachment 8967

Just don't do that and you'll be able to relax and have another beer. JB will probably join you, he's always ready for a beer.

 

[leeshor]

Very sad.

I have a customer who does a lot of business with Samsung and spends a week every so often at their headquarter. He knows the people there so well he refuses to purchase anything with a Samsung name on it. On the other hand I love their phones and have 2 of their TVs and they're great. But I never met the honchos he deals with or maybe I'd feel the same way.

 

[Tom T]

Jellybean should be out for the Note soon enough so the nightmare, as it were, should be over shortly. As big a deal as this would seem to be I have had about 0 people I know with a bricked Note or GS2. Kind of makes you wonder if Samsung just figured you would probably only do the data wipe if you were getting a new phone, and whoever you were going to sell it to would have to buy a new phone as well. Like to think this isn't the case.

Sent from my Galaxy Note 10.1

 

[idontknow]

I got it, thank you Spider .So if I want to reset my phablet, let's say because I want to sell it, I'll have to throw it in the garbage instead because when I press the reset button, I'll brick my note!