Samsung in hot water over splashy Australian phone ads

&gt;The company attributed that to a manufacturing defect, affecting a small number of phones, which it soon fixed. But customers online continued reporting problems, forum comments show.<p>I wish corporations would stop using the “only affects a small number” excuse. I understand the motivation behind that but feels really bad when you’re affected and you can obviously see it’s not a small number.

So here we have a large multinational corporation that has let batteries explode on planes, sold bendy phones that don&#x27;t really bend so well, and just flat out lied about the capabilities of a phone in a multi-million dollar ad campaign.<p>I&#x27;m <i>really</i> trying not to be one of those crazy &quot;wake up sheeple!&quot; type crazy folk. But surely the public will wake up soon to the dangers of letting these giant megacorps run free without better regulatory oversight?<p>All we do is slap them on the wrist with a few million dollars of fines and say &quot;now now! Don&#x27;t do that again!&quot;. Then we wonder why fining them for less than they probably spent on the damn marketing campaign isn&#x27;t deterring them from doing it all over again.

I remember these ads running here in Italy. it was funny to see the phone in water and written under in not so small letters &quot;don&#x27;t do as shown it doesn&#x27;t resist running water&quot;<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;4B-fPS3W9Og" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;4B-fPS3W9Og</a><p>saved them a lawsuit I guess.

<i>It centers on more than 300 advertisements in which Samsung showed its Galaxy phones being used at the bottom of swimming pools and in the ocean.</i><p>I know that iPhones and similar can survive being dropped in a pool but can you actually &quot;use&quot; a Samsung underwater?<p><i>Some consumers damaged their phones when exposing them to water and Samsung had refused to honor warranty claims</i><p>So can it be used in water, or not? If Samsung shows a phone being used underwater, I don&#x27;t understand why it wouldn&#x27;t honor a water damage claim.

Working consumer protection agencies are awesome.<p>Earlier this year another Australian consumer won against Apple when they dropped their iPhone in a pool and it stopped working (after Phil Schiller said said you can drop it in the pool and it will be fine) <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;apple&#x2F;comments&#x2F;aiknf4&#x2F;i_fought_apple_and_won&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;apple&#x2F;comments&#x2F;aiknf4&#x2F;i_fought_appl...</a>

I don&#x27;t know about this one but I regularly wash my Moto phone under the tap (for hygiene reasons) and so far it has been working without problems (for 2 years or so). So I don&#x27;t think its impossible for the Samsung one to act as in the ads.