Over the last couple of years, there have been a number of incidents with third party accessories – specifically batteries – causing issues(exploding) with smartphones, Samsung as one of the largest manufacturers has certainly born the brunt of the PR blowback as their products have been involved on a number of occasions, but Samsung is possibly looking to implement a new policy to fight this by ensuring that only ‘official’ Samsung accessories are used on their future Smartphones.
According to a report from Korean news site ETNews Samsung could be looking to embed a ‘chip’ of some description into their official accessories, that would authorise the accessory with the phone and prevent any un-authorised accessory from being used. According to the report this would affect anything from chargers and batteries to Smartcovers, although exactly what the ‘chip’ would entail is not specified, but some manner of NFC or RFID could conceivably be involved.
With Samsung selling the largest amount of Smartphones, they represent a rather large pool of third party accessories available in-store in Australian retailers and is quite a large market for third party manufacturers, any move away from allowing even third party covers would be a big step. It remains to be seen if this new idea will be implemented, but it’s interesting that they would consider it.
Will a policy enforcing use of ‘official’ accessories on Samsungs products change your mind on future purchases?
