holiday season. On 18 December 2016, Verizon announced they would be distributing the update on 5 January 2017. Sprint also said it would not distribute this update until January 2017. Verizon later announced it would redirect all outgoing calls (excluding emergency calls) made on unreturned Galaxy Note 7 devices to a service hotline demanding that they be returned, and threatened to charge customers a fee equaling the total retail cost of the phone if they refused to comply. On 9 January 2017, Samsung released another update in South Korea which blocked the device from being charged beyond 15%. On 24 March 2017, Samsung released another update for South Korean users, barring charging of the Galaxy Note 7. Aftermath The Verge panned Samsung's overall handling of the battery faults and recall, arguing that the company had initially delivered unclear messaging over whether or not the devices were still safe to use, as well as its slow communication with the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission, which had the capacity to issue an official recall in the United States. The arguments were based on data released on 13 September 2016 by the research firm Apteligent, which stated that Galaxy Note 7 usage had been "almost exactly the same" since the announcement of the exchange program. The Verge also noted that the U.S. government's ban on taking Galaxy Note 7 phones aboard airline flights was "perhaps unprecedented", acknowledging that only the ban of hoverboards by individual airlines for similar reasons—an entire class of products (albeit one that was "admittedly fire-prone because of cheap materials")—came close to a legal ban for a single consumer product in terms of overall magnitude. Kyle Weins of Wired felt that Samsung switched to non-removable batteries in order to imitate the industrial design of Apple after having used removable batteries on many of its past models, such as the Galaxy Note 4. He argued that this design decision exacerbated the battery faults of the Note 7 by requiring users to replace the entire phone instead of only the battery. He suggested that Samsung could "lead the pack" in the future by switching back to removable batteries, as with other "responsible" OEMs such as HP and LG Electronics. Analysts argued that the recall had hurt Samsung's brand, and would likely result in the company losing its market share to competitors, including Apple and Google (which had recently unveiled their respective iPhone