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Comment by basicplus2 | Hacker News Reader

I don't get this... Its the battery.. not the phone. Surely discontinue the battery.

Perhaps they feel the Note 7 name has been completely burnt (sorry!) in the public's eye and any attempt to salvage it at this point would cost them more than they could ever hope to recoup from further sales.

The only other thing I can think of is they've identified an issue with the phone itself that's causing this and either they or, more likely in my opinion, their insurance providers aren't willing to take the risk putting any more into the wild.

Couldn't it be the charging circuit? Or some fault in the power circuits that draws too much current too quickly? ie it might be something that is easy to replace like the battery, but something that requires a fundamental redesign of the electronics.

My presumption is that circuits designed to limit charge rates and voltage to the battery are built into the "battery pack" thus replacing this would be all that is required.

Yes, I find it strange too. Why can't they simply replace the battery with some other model? Even if it's internal, replacing it would cost way less than writing off the entire line.

They could probably drop in a replacement with what, half the capacity? But that impacts the whole design of the 'phone. There's a huge difference between a phone that lasts one day and a phone that lasts half a day. So they'd be looking to lower the screen brightness, maybe find a less power-hungry processor and/or LTE chip,.... by the time you've finished accomodating that kind of change it's a new model anyway.

3500 mAh doesn't strike as something astonishing. There are Chinese phones with >5000 mAh battery for sale (though I would not dare to vouch for their safety), even Galaxy S7 have 3000 mAh battery.

Small enough to fit in the space they had in the Note 7?

You should take the advertised battery size of anything from China with a very large pinch of salt.

Chinese 5000 mAh is around 1000 mAh metric

Surely not. I have 4000 mAh Chinese phone and it works 2 full days with normal (browsing, GPS, pdf reading) use. I don't doubt it's not "metric" 4000 mAh, but surely more than 1000 mAh, maybe 2000-3000 mAh.

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