Samsung Galaxy Note 7 owners told to turn off device | Hacker News Reader

Samsung Galaxy Note 7 owners told to turn off device

bbc.com

98 pointsM_Grey105 comments

Can anyone on hackernews comment on the specific issue in the Note 7? And why was it (seemingly) easy to screw up the replacement phones as well?

Are we taking for granted the lengths that other hardware manufacturers go to to make sure such issues don't occur with their batteries? (At least, those innovating in regard to battery capacity, chemistry, and shape)

Indeed, it just seems inconceivable that a company with Samsung's experience and institutional knowledge about Li-ion technology could so thoroughly and irreparably botch something like this.

Li-ion in 2016 is, outside of the occasional 3-5 years-away breakthrough story, boring, a mature technology. One would think the best practices for safely building power supplies around it would have been settled on years ago.

Or: Am I wrong and there are in fact several competing standards in the industry right now? Is there actually some present innovation in Li-ion that Samsung may have utilized, in retrospect prematurely, in the Note 7?

While li-ion is widely used in practice, I don't think it's fair to say it is a mature technology (as a sibling commenter points out, there are still lots of research papers coming out in the field) or that it is well understood.

For example, Boeing had problems with battery fires on the 787 in 2013 and 2014. "The causes of the battery failures are still unknown."[1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_787_Dreamliner_battery_...

Li-ion is a widely deployed technology that isn't very good. Like coal.

This battery chemistry is inherently fragile. Drive a nail through a Li-ion battery and it will explode. Tesla had to put a titanium plate under their battery after some fires from punctures by road debris. If a Li-ion battery overheats, it will go into thermal runaway and increase its temperature until it catches fire. Overcharging alone is sufficient to do this. It takes about six safety devices to make a Li-ion battery reasonably safe. Leave some of them out, and you get the hoverboard debacle.

There are safer battery chemistries, such as LiFePO4, but you give up about 14% energy density.

> Drive a nail through a Li-ion battery and it will explode.

It's misleading to say that it "will" explode. As the following video shows, they don't always.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pqPFuzRIANs

That's LiPo though, not Li-Ion

There are far more boring things that have created immeasurable problems, around 2001/2 capacitors began leaking and rendering almost every electrical device that was fitted with useless after around a year of use. By the time the problem had been discovered, the capacitors were in widespread use all over the world.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacitor_plague

That was not a slip - that was clearly intended failure.

Apparently it was because they used an incomplete copy of an electrolyte formula developed in Japan, but didn't understand the chemistry of the formula properly.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacitor_plague#Industrial_es...

Isn't the problem here that they don't know what the issue is? Or that there are a multitude of issues? I've yet to see a statement from Samsung that wasn't vague or unconvincing.

(And in at least one case, it seems they're more concerned about covering up their incompetence than explaining their incompetence: http://www.theverge.com/2016/10/9/13215728/samsung-galaxy-no...)

If they do actually know what the issue is, they certainly haven't actually told anyone. They've only given generic and sort of hand-wavy "we fixed it don't worry" kind of explanations.

Well today's statements seem fairly straightforward - don't use it, don't try and exchange it, and to retailers - stop selling it.

If I had to bet it'd be that they don't know what the issue is, given the PR damage of combusting replacements.

You're right, their statement now it's pretty clear. Initially, things were worse. They give out conflicting information to different people, no one was really sure if it was a recall or how to handle it. That was weeks ago.

My father-in-law is a PhD chemist that reads various research papers for fun. I don't pretend to understand the field, but he has talked about Li-ion batteries some.

His main concern about Li-ion is that it is a still heavy researched field. There are lots of papers and studies coming out about the material and how it can be used in application. The volume of papers around the topic is a sign to him that it's not as well understood of a material as the public believes.

Couldn't this be because Li-ion is currently a hot field with lots of commercial applications?

I'm not a chemist (my dad was, but got out of the field right after I was born), but that's what I see in computer science research. When OOP was hot we saw a huge volume of papers in subtyping systems, faster method dispatch, design patterns, etc. When XML was hot we saw a lot of papers on tree-diffing, compression of tree structures, etc. After BigTable, Dynamo, Riak came out we saw a lot of papers on distributed systems and CRDTs.

It makes sense that as a technology catches on in industry, the amount of research grants related to that technology increases, which incentivizes scientists to study that topic in more depth.

You need to keep in mind that Li-ion does not describe just one type of battery it describes the specific method by which a battery operates (intercalation of Li Ions). There is continuous experimentation to improve the performance.

Additionally the materials which make up the battery can vary. The cathode of a Li-Ion battery is typically some type of lithium intermetallic compound (typically Lithium-Cobolt based) and the anode can vary (from simple graphite to intermetallic compounds to more exotic things like Sn nano-particles, polymers etc).

In 2010 my undergraduate thesis in materials engineering was on developing a prototype anode made from graphene dispersed Tin-Cobolt nanoparticles. This was back when graphene was first discovered and was being pretty widely hyped as a 'wonder material'. It was hoped that by dispersing the metal particles in graphene matrix we could better accommodate the mechanical stresses that come from cycling the battery (when you intercalate and deintercalate Li ions there is a volume expansion and subsequent contraction - this is what causes battery to degrade after charge/discharge cycles). Results were mostly inconclusive largely due to unreliability of synthesis technique we used for manufacturing graphene - Electrostatic Spray reductive Precipitation (ESRP).

But yes Undergraduates are messing around with Li-Ion technology its not surprising corporations are too.

Any recommended resources (textbooks, course lecture notes/videos) for someone with moderate science background (say intro college courses in chemistry, electromagnetism, circuits) to learn about batteries?

https://www.amazon.com/Principles-Electronic-Materials-Devic... This is the textbook I used at Uni. It's a little pricey I remember it being pretty good.

I talked to an acquaintance at Apple about the new iPhone recently, and the Galaxy Note 7 topic came up. I wasn't aware that the problem hasn't been publicly revealed. So, here's what I remember of that conversation; though maybe it is just speculation and hearsay.

According to said acquaintance, the Note 7 was designed with profile requirements that limited the thickness of the battery. The battery designers had to make the battery thinner than what was previously considered safe. Lithium batteries (technical portion that I likely didn't understand correctly) are built in layers and each layer has to be separated from each other. To thin the battery profile, they minimized these inert layers between the lithium layers. However, they didn't make the battery thin enough. So, when it is installed, the rest of the phone compresses the battery and compromises those thin layers around its edges. (I am guessing here.) When the layers touch that is completing a circuit (or some chemical reaction) which is the reason the phone is producing so much heat.

I'd be interested to hear from someone that could verify these speculative details.

The conversation I had was a couple weeks ago, but I did my best to explain the details to the best of my ability (from memory and on a topic that I have a minimal education).

So what, they're telling customers to go without a smartphone while they figure out what to do? I doubt many of them will be willing to pick up a different Samsung phone in the meantime. Looks like a boon for LG HTC and Apple.

You could tell it would get really bad when they stopped issuing replacement phones. Not being able to find a big bad problem twice is a huge mistake for a hardware company in a very competitive market.

> I doubt many of them will be willing to pick up a different Samsung phone in the meantime.

To be fair the Note 7 and the S7 Edge are damn near identical. Screen, camera, design, all very close. It's just that S Pen really. If someone doesn't care about that, they have a Samsung option right there.

Traded in my S3, that had been doing well over the years but started losing charge more quickly, for an S6. First one overheated so badly when running updates the first time I thought I would burn my fingers. Traded it in thinking it was a bum phone. New phone heats up but not as bad. Lost charge very quickly very fast though and will freeze with video at times. I use a quick-charging cable now to keep it 'topped up' to take to work each day.

Looking forward to trading it in ASAP for a non-Samsung phone.

The Takata airbag recall as well as the Note 7 are two of the most high profile recalls I can think of in recent history. Can anyone think of any other recalls that affected so many consumers and received so much press coverage?

In the UK about ten years ago Coke launched Dasani Water only to have a complete PR disaster when two things happened

1. The UK isn't used to the idea of bottled water from the tap, versus a spring, which caused some mockery which may have been survivable except...

2. After testing by food standards agencies the water was found to have elevated levels of bromate causing all stock to be recalled.

The upshot was the brand was completely tainted in the UK and was never relaunched by Coke there.

Does coke have any watered bottle brands in the UK, just not labeled as Dasani?

Smartwater - "inspired by rain" or something like that. It is hilarious and offensive in equal measure.

They take Lake District spring water, distil it (removing any point of using spring water, and using a ton of pointless extra energy), then inject some snake oil, sorry electrolytes.

Looks like they sell Schweppes water in the UK.

http://www.coca-cola.co.uk/drinks/schweppes-water/schweppes-...

Coca-Cola sell River Rock bottled water in NI and Ireland but I don't think that they 'export' it to the big island

Glaceu

Not exactly recent history, but perhaps still the highest profile to date? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_Tylenol_murders

Ford Pinto, Intel Pentium

And people are still making exploding Pinto jokes, almost 40 years later, so don't hold your breath on some relief from the Samsung wisecracking.

Seriously... people will forgive and forget a lot, but something they don't expect to explode, exploding on them? Memorable.

And yet I dont see anyone complaining about Intel processors being unable to do FP calculations. People made jokes for a while with the FDIV bug but Intel just did the recall and moved on.

Samsung will get over it. So will consumers. The brand is a juggernaut.

I don't know that they will. If the first recall had been enough - that they'd really found the problem, fixed it and made things up to their customers, I think they could have done well. Taking decisive, painful and effective action would have demonstrated their commitment to their customers.

But they didn't solve the problem, gave people replacement devices they said were safe and were wrong about that again. I'm not suggesting malice here. I think that it is perfectly plausible (even likely) that they thought they had found and fixed the problem and were just wrong. But that doesn't really matter. They may not be malicious, but they are demonstrably incompetent when it comes to safety. That's probably worse.

Oh I agree this is not malice. Sounds like some battery supplier to Samsung screwed up. No excuses from Samsung QA but presumably the battery supplier really screwed up their QA or manufacturing processes.

Even with the news that the Note 7 is effectively dead....I dont think this will be more than a blip on Samsung's history and some uncomfortable quarterly financial reports. I am certain they are not 'finished' in the sense that consumers will stop purchasing Samsung phones. Time will tell.

Except there aren't really alternatives for PC compatible hardware, in what concerns x86 processors.

AMD is nice and all, I do have a few computers with them, but they hardly matter worldwide in terms of marketshare.

Samsung is another matter, there are plenty of smartphone brands to choose from and compatibility isn't a requirement.

There arent currently alternatives in the x86 market. Certainly Intel were the biggest back then, but the market share was around 70-75% not 85%+ that is it now.

I remember when this FDIV bug happened in ~94-95, at the time there were plenty of x86 manufacturers. AMD presented probably the biggest competitive threat to Intel. IBM, Cyrix, VIA were all cheap-and-cheerful CPUs that found their way into plenty of office desktops via OEMs.

AMD were a serious problem for Intel around 1998-2001 with their K7 architecture. The Athlons and Durons were incredible bang for buck and owned the desktop high-end mindshare. Anyway that's a discussion for another time :)

Back to phones - Samsung dominate the Android phone space. Time will tell if people move away but history suggests they'll be perfectly fine. People still drive Toyota despite product defects killing people.

I guarantee in 12 months people wont give a shit if the latest Samsung phone is a top performer. Phones are a status symbol. Safety rarely trumps fashion in the consumer retail world.

Sure, but are ford hurting? Did they ever come close?

This is trivia compared to the Ford tire recalls or the Toyota brakes recall.

Not that you're wrong about how well-known the Toyota unintended acceleration fiasco was, but, despite agreeing to a settlement, there's simply no evidence that there was anything wrong with the cars.

I can't see how they had a choice in the matter. What I found the strangest about all these dire Toyota NHTSA problems came about right after the US Government became the major shareholder to the GM corporation, did the auto bailouts, cash for clunkers, etc.

Very coincidental.

I don't think so. If that airplane had already departed when the replaced and supposedly safe phone caught fire a lot of people would be probably dead. I would not call this trivia.

The ending of Mass Effect 3.

Sub-prime mortgages?

MBS crisis wasn't because of a "recall" or even because of the excessive bad loans.

What really killed the system was that there were side bets worth magnitudes more than the MBS securities themselves that the market would keep going up because no-one really looked into the crap going under those bonds and how risky they really were.

I should've said 'credit default swaps'. OTOH, is it fair to say that the CDS prompted an excess of mortgages?

And I do think there's room for viewing the extraordinary actions the Fed took as a recall, e.g. MBS purchases during QE 1, 2, 3....

Was just on a regional Southwest flight today. The pilot instructed everyone with a "Samsung Galaxy" (not specifically the Note 7) to power-off their device for the remainder of the flight. I'm sure the generalization of the warning was an over-cautious oversight.

It might also have to do with the fact that a lot of people (especially non-techies) don't know which galaxy they have (which is odd because I've noticed that people always seem to know if they have the M7, M8 or M10).

Last week a stewardess told us to power-off any "Galaxy 7" device.

People will start listening when Samsung says "Put the phone in a fireplace, or an oven, or any bathtub made of porcalin, and then dial 911."

1. Make a version with the removable battery (+3-5mm to thickness).

2. Have a an option with battery pack using the 18650 or similar cells (also would have much more capacity), can be interchangeable with normal thinner battery.

Anyway, that idiocy with large ultra-thin lipo powered devices must come to an end (otherwise you have a ready ignition if it is bends).

PS: One cannot exclude insiders from competition contaminating the separator film during the battery manufacture.

Replaceable battery on Note 8 (I hope!).

I've seen this suggested on other threads, but why? If your phone starts smoking and burning out are you really going to start fiddling with it to remove the now red-hot battery? What are you going to do with it if you do remove it? All you've done is remove a physical barrier between the incendiary device and flamables in the environment.

We don't even know if the flaw is in the battery itself. Maybe it's in the charging circuitry, or even the software controlling the charging cycle. Personally in a situation like this I wouldn't care where the flaw was, I'd want a different replacement device anyway. Especially if even the device manufacturer apparently can't figure out how to make these things safe.

Finally, one theory is that Samsung designed the battery cells to be too thin. Since removable battery designs reduce the amount of space available for a battery, the constraints on the battery size would be even greater, conceivably making an issue like this even more likely.

It's not about just what the user can do with a replaceable battery, it's about how much easier it becomes for the company to replace batteries in the field (and backplate, if too thin): just ship new batteries and have user come and immediately leave with a "fixed" phone. (Of course, if your new battery is also broken, then nothing really can help.)

And — do correct me if I'm wrong — but removable batteries don't add thickness, only length.

I dont think this is the first time they have an issue with batteries, when I bought my S4, the battery swell up while charging, there was a recall, but since it was user replaceable you just got a new battery and everything was fine.

So basically a recall without the hassle of having to replace all of these phones?

...And with all of the risks that someone won't get the message, and really hurt themselves. As it stands, this is going to be a nightmare for Samsung to recover from, just in terms of PR.

Why the advice to turn it off? Wouldn't it make more sense (be safer) to leave it somewhere and let it drain down naturally?

I don't know anything about why the phones explode, how come letting it discharge be safer?

Because with no energy in the battery it can't explode. Otherwise you have a potential ticking time bomb.

discharged battery != no energy in battery

discharged battery = no electrically extractable energy in battery

There's still plenty of chemical energy in the battery.

Maybe you could just take the battery out...

Oh, yea, about that.

I'll stick with my S5 till it falls apart.

There is at least one of these comments on every single story about the Note. We get it already, removable battery yada yada yada.

It's a valid complaint when batteries lose nearly half of their capacity or more within the first year, and people tend to keep their phones longer than that. Just not buying the phones doesn't necessarily get the word out as to why, but posts like this do. It may seem trivial, as posts on forums generally are, but in greater numbers they become less trivial.

It is a valid complaint. However, I mostly read it on tech blogs so it is pretty much preaching to the choir.

_We_ all know the pros and cons of a replaceable battery already. _We_ don't need to be told all the time.

Edit: Please note that if your battery is losing half or more of its capacity w/in one year, it is defective. Have it replaced. (Off the top of my head, I think Apple's guide is 80% remaining capacity within a warranted period. Surely other OEMs are similar).

Who keeps their phone for over a year? No one rational, that's for sure.

If you think its wasteful to change your phone annually, you better never go to the movies, buy coffee outside, etc. The hours-per-dollar return on a phone is better than anything else you can spend money on save for a PC, mattress, and a few other objects.

> Who keeps their phone for over a year? No one rational, that's for sure.

Most people do, there is nothing irrational about it. Just because something is cheap doesn't mean you should buy more of it.

What kind of silly wasteful thinking has infected you?

What if instead of getting caught in a consumerism loop of enriching Samsung and Apple (and Starbucks in your listed cases) I save my money, invest it, and attempt to be an environmentally friendly person in general.

You are an addict. Waste is your addiction.

My daughter just got a replacement for my old iPhone 3GS. She was still using it until week before last, with the original battery. It can even still connect to the app store.

Rocking a 2 year old iPhone 6 here, which is still working fine. No desire to replace it until at least the next release cycle.

I kept my last non-smart phone for at least 7 years. If it ain't broke...

It's a valid complaint when non-removable batteries are only there to increase frequency of device replacement. It's valid when batteries don't last anywhere near a day once you've installed some things.

In prehistoric times, when batteries lasted ages, many device docks had a slot to charge your spare battery as well.

Progress?

Prehistoric mobile phones had effectively 0 energy drain other than the PA in the cell radio. Modern devices have many more sources of significant power drain including multiple PAs, high resolution screens, high quality cameras, and compute which is within a couple orders of magnitude of desktop machines.

The death of the user serviceable battery isn't planned obsolescence, it's a tradeoff to shove the most energy storage possible into a given volume.

Market doesn't ever seem to bear that out. S3 mAh matched Nexus 4 and similar, iPhone 4&5 were a lot less. Pixel XL is only thing I can think of with more mAh than an LG V20. There may be others.

I strongly question how much energy storage is being lost by having the battery sit on some contacts behind a removable backplate rather than be soldered in place in the same spot anyways.

I'm wondering, if they allowed an extra millimeter of thickness to the phone, if it would still be having these issues. Instead, it would have been a Note 7 with 4 extra hours of functioning time, not an exploding phone.

The point is not that the complaint is invalid. The point is that it is not an interesting enough contribution to be repeated endlessly.

There is some discussion that the battery is not the cause, it is related to the fast charge feature, in which case replacing the battery would have zero effect.

Cue the new Samsung mobile strategy, picking up Google-retired project Ara, and pushing for easy recall.. I mean green modular phones.

S5 Active here... I plan to use it until it literally dies, and I'm not sure that there's a force on Earth that can kill it.

Galaxy S4 here. Still going strong. One day in the future, I will upgrade to an S5.

Galaxy S3 user here.

It is a bummer to be stuck with Android 4.3, but I do most of my hobby coding in C++ anyway and that has hardly changed, other than Vulkan support.

In any case my next phone isn't going to be a Samsung one, ability to replace batteries and use SD cards are two non negotiable features for me.

There is a fix. Legislate the minimum thickness of lithium batteries. This will stop the idiocy of smaller/lighter right in its tracks. The thinner the battery, the closer the positive and negative terminals are, and the greater the risk of bending or pressure causing them to contact. In case you didn't notice there are lots and lots of people buying bigger devices these days. Bigger phones, bigger tablets. Samsung even sells a tablet with an 18.4 inch screen, the Galaxy View. There is a market for all kinds of devices and there is no need to compromise public safety for the sake of fashion. For that matter, you don't even need to legislate it. The airlines just have to start demanding that all tablets and phones are measured against a thickness scale. If your device does not fit through the slot, you can't take it on board. You either don't fly or you pay a mandatory fee for safekeeping until you return.

Isn't this how bad laws happen. Eg. do you think that in 20 years thickness issues won't be completely solved, likely by some completely different technology. Yet some stupid law from 2016 requires that a brand new product segment has to have an arbitrary thickness applied.

Yes, we could just remove that law when that day occurs but that doesn't always happen so easily.

> The thinner the battery, the closer the positive and negative terminals are.

Absolutely false. All lithium ion batteries are made of 4 paper thin layers: two electrodes and two separators. These are cut in narrow strips and folded on themselves many times over, even in a thin battery. A thinner battery will simply have fewer folds. The distance between the two electrodes is given by the thickness of the separators and it has nothing to do with the thickness of the cell.

Here's a teardown: https://youtu.be/uI1eRy0uBI8?t=958 (possibly NSFW-ish language).

You're the kind of person responsible for those shitty CARB-regulated gas can valves.

You mean the ones that almost guarantee that I'll spill a bit of gas each time I use them, those ones? The ones that are so bad that the best alternative is a “utility container”[1]?

Seriously, I've never seen such a counter-productive regulation in my life.

[1] https://amzn.com/B00SJWPKAG

Fun story: I and some buddies were in Colorado skiing over spring break. My buddy accidentally left his truck idling overnight and ran out of gas. We had a gas can, so no problem, right? Well, thanks to CARB, the gas can valve was so complicated that it jammed up (probably due to the cold) and could not be operated. We tried smashing it open, and eventually some spring-loaded piece shot into the trees and the can was still stuck shut. Thanks, congress!

A neighbor ended up having an illegal jerry can that actually worked.

Because much thicker batteries, like the ones in laptops in the early 2000's manufactured by Sony, never have any issues at all. I certainly didn't have to give mine back to Apple so they give me one it wasn't likely to explode.