US carriers halt Samsung Note 7 sales and replacements

On the one hand, the hard ware is great. I got them cheap refurbished and they have a good community. On the other it gets hot, like burning hot touch. I've been through three batteries since getting it. The boot loop on mine made me switch phones. The thing that is making me pause with them is the software. I'm not fond of the custimaztions, but I can live with them. What got me is getting a marshmallow security update nuked the phone. WiFi stopped working, any earphones in the jack always started "Ok Google" recognigtion. Cell Signal went to 2G, and the Home/Back/OpenApps buttons stopped working. It turned the phone into a brick. I finally got around to rolling back this weekend, which took several hours. This wasn't just me I saw similar complaints on XDA.

Last I recall they looked a bit off. Nice, but a bit off. That said, my experience with OLED screens is a bit dated, so maybe the color reproduction has improved.

I should note that for some reason it seems like most smartphone manufacturers, basically everyone aside from Apple, way oversaturate their displays, this is especially true in the case of Samsung. Even the Nexus 6P display looked horrendous to me out of the box. Fortunately there is a setting in the developer options to enable sRGB mode which makes a huge difference.

Regarding power consumption, I think OLED mostly loses out on efficiency when generating white backgrounds, but I'm not sure how much of a battery hit this causes in normal use scenarios.

As to what's so great about OLED, for me, as someone who frequently uses their phone in relatively low light situations, I absolutely love the deep blacks and the fact that when I have the phone on low brightness using a dark theme it barely produces any ambient light. On that note, Google seriously needs to introduce a system wide dark theme. I don't have an iPhone but I'm really interested to see if/when Apple adopts OLED whether they redesign iOS to take advantage of it. I know many people dislike the bright white UI of iOS and Android.

OLED displays have a very wide color gamut. If you have source material that was tuned to it, there's really nothing like it. To get a similar gamut with LCD you need a quantum dot backlight. Samsung devices all have a screen mode where they constrain their gamut to sRGB for more accurate colors, though.

In terms of color accuracy, they've consistently been the best around, when set to limit their gamut to sRGB. This (http://www.displaymate.com/Galaxy_Note7_ShootOut_1.htm) site has test results for most recentish smartphones and tablets and declared the Note 7's display to be "the best performing Smartphone Display that we have ever tested." Every Samsung device with an OLED display released in the last few years has achieved this.

And of course the contrast ratio is much better than LCD. In terms of display quality, provided the phone can be set to sRGB mode, OLED is as good or better than LCD in every metric. And this doesn't even touch on all of the novel uses a display that uses no power when displaying black can be put to - for example, Samsung devices can typically display the time or notifications in white-on-black on the display persistently when the screen is otherwise 'off'. With OLED, only the pixels that are active are drawing power.

The only problem with OLED has been blue pixel decay. I have an OLED display in both my tablet and my phone and I'm a heavy user, and I haven't noticed any change in the 2 years I've owned them though.

Really, it's just a better technology. It's shameful that everyone has allowed Samsung to maintain a lock on it. I really wish I didn't have to buy Samsung devices to get this fantastic technology.

For what it's worth I have a Nexus 6P which uses a Samsung display and I haven't noticed any burn in yet, although I'm probably a very moderate user so that's not really saying much.

It should take more than a little bit of unexpected strain to ignite a consumer electronics device.

Well there's larger and there's a lot larger. This particular iteration increased the gap substantially.

3500 mAh (GN7) >> 3000 mAH (GN5) ~ 2950 mAH (i7+) > 2750 mAH (i6S+)

Below article offers speculation either way: that both the design itself and push for larger batteries was at fault and/or that it is simply a manufacturing error although they seem like two sides of the same coin -- at the end of the day you can't get around the fact that more batteries simply take up more internal space and the larger that 'more' is the harder the engineering problem is. Giving the engineers a hard design problem and then not giving them the corresponding necessary time to develop and test their designs is ultimately what's responsible for the defect.

http://phys.org/news/2016-09-galaxy-recall-stronger-batterie...

South Korean experts suggested Samsung may have been so ambitious with the Note 7's design that it compromised safety.

"There was no choice but to make the separator (between positive and negative anodes) thin because of the battery capacity," said Lee Sang-yong, a professor at Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology who worked more than a decade at LG Chem, a leading lithium battery maker. Thicker separators can improve safety but will not necessarily prevent all overheating issues, he said.

Doh Chil-Hoon, head of the state-run Korea Electrotechnology Research Institute's battery research division, said that based on the limited information provided by Samsung, he believes the push to increase battery power was part of the problem.

"Even with a small manufacturing mistake, if there had been enough elements to ensure safety, it would not explode," Doh said. "It is a roundabout way of admitting weak safety."

...

[Wayne Lam, an industry analyst at IHS Markit Technology] said he thinks the Note 7 battery problem resulted from weak controls in manufacturing, not a poor or unsafe design.

A spokeswoman at iFixit, which publishes repair guides for electronic gadgets, offered a similar view. "We don't think any internal design changes in the Note 7 are responsible for the exploding batteries—more likely just a manufacturing defect," IFixit's Kay-Kay Clapp said in an email.

Apple has tweaked hardware and software it developed itself to make iPhones use power more efficiently, while Samsung has increased the capacity of the batteries in its phones.

That can be done without increasing size by adjusting components or changing the production process, Lam said.

"You have two different trajectories, with Samsung packing in more energy density, versus Apple trying to trim it down by optimizing everything else," he said, adding that the two rivals are "constantly locked in this arms race of improving and one-upping."

Note though that those comments come before the replacements started exploding, something that implicates a deeper design flaw than just the battery production.

Puredick® New Laptop Battery for Dell Precision M6400 M6500, fits C565C G102C F678F KR854 8M039 5K145 DW554 P267P -12 Months Warranty[Li-ion 9-cell 11.1V 90Wh] https://www.amazon.com/dp/B018VAY2RW/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_2VZ-...

I suspect it's also a lot cheaper to recall/replace a handful of batteries than to recall/replace every single phone.

But to be fair I don't do system updates so I don't experience the gradual slowdown that comes with increasing software bloat.

Are you sure there's no selection bias going on here? In today's media/internet climate, I think your vastly more likely to hear about extraordinary events that have been filmed than those that haven't.

Faulty consumer electronics remaining faulty after refurbishment is anything but extraordinary.