What good is owning the phone with the world’s best display on paper if said screen becomes unresponsive to touch or exhibits various “dead zones” out in the real world mere days after globally going on sale?

No, early Galaxy S9 and S9+ issues reported across a number of Reddit and Samsung Community threads don’t seem anywhere as dramatic as Note 7 explosions, but they may well be enough to drive some potential customers away.

It’s still hard to tell how widespread this disease might be, and for its part, Samsung is predictably trying to play down the impact by claiming the company is currently “looking into a limited number of reports of Galaxy S9/S9+ touchscreen responsiveness issues.”

Arguably more serious than the occasional burn-in snafu, the “dead zone” problem manifests itself just as the name suggests. Basically, dozens of S9 owners and, for some reason, a significantly larger number of S9 Plus users say their phones either came out the box with unusable portions of the screen or that they started acting up shortly after initial setup.

Bizarrely enough, the complaints’ specifics are hardly similar, with some S9 and S9+ units described as showing “a few dead spots on the bottom half of the screen”, while others’ “top parts” appear to be dying on their excited early adopters, and one phone even presenting a “dead strip that runs horizontal next to the bottom volume button.”

There’s not a lot you can do to try to fix the glitch at home, apart from performing a factory reset, which may or may not work, and increasing touch sensitivity as a possible workaround of sorts. Of course, you’re definitely entitled to a replacement or full refund, or you can wait and see how Samsung tackles the controversy once its ongoing “investigation” concludes.