Why Samsung Abandoned Its Galaxy Note 7 Flagship Phone

I suppose this could mean the Note 8 (7+?) will come a bit sooner.

> Even though the percentage is vanishingly small

I thought so too. I meant it's just been three explosions, or so I heard. However this article claims 97 incidents with breakdowns on overheating vs burning. It seems pretty significant. I mean, not statically against devices in the wild, but it takes a relatively few amount of safety incidents to question an entire product line.

Doesn't help the engineers weren't able to solve the issue though.

This "vanishingly small" number is still way, way too high. Five in a week? If there's one thing you don't want your electronics to do it's potentially kill people.

There was a rash of exploding battery cells in the 2006-2007 era where Apple even issued a recall. At the time Apple was still using off-the-shelf cells and hadn't started to make their own batteries. This affected many other vendors using the same suppliers.

Even Boeing's planes were not immune to battery problems, with the 787 famously suffering some serious issues, including fires.

Battery technology is something that's very hard to get absolutely right, to render something safe enough it won't explode. You want a lot of "sigmas" in your quality to avoid any serious defects.

I don't know what Apple does to their batteries, but the sorts of abuse they can apparently endure without catching fire is remarkable: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iy5kAY5SqEk

>This is completely not a technical decision, it's a branding and marketing decision. Even though the percentage is vanishingly small

Because engineers are OK if "only" 1 in 100,000 devices explodes and hurts someone?

> Even though the percentage is vanishingly small, Samsung cannot be associated with exploding phones.

It's still high enough to indicate a general manufacturing problem. To ditch it completely may mostly be a marketing decision but to put production on hold for some time to investigate and really fix the root cause seems to be reasonable. It may also help internal processes making sure that no additional item from a possible faulty batch ever gets sold accidentally. Maybe we will see a similar device in a few months, maybe branded differently, maybe with a redesigned casing, maybe some marketing campaign showing how well they've protected the battery this time.

I disagree. Samsung seemed to have proactively started replacing phones. Even before the media hyped it up. When they tried replacing, it still would overheat. Eventually management gave up mostly because as others have said they couldn't figure out why the phones were heating up in the first place.

Can confirm. Just took a flight yesterday and noticed the Galaxy 7 warning had become part of the official spiel read by the gate attendants when announcing flight info.

One of the more comical attendees turned it into a joke, something like '... If you would like to stow your larger carry on, please come to the counter.... If you have a Samsung Galaxy 7, please place it in the garbage prior to entering the aircraft...'.

It was a crowded flight with a long line and already delayed. He was just trying to lighten up the atmosphere, and everyone did laugh, so it was clever.

For Samsung, this is a marketing nightmare for one their most profitable brands.

Well it's can be called an overload when you have components interacting with each other in a tiny space and add to that not giving people enough time to test the design. Obviously (imho) more time for testing and QA would have solved the issue.

Dedicated ICs for LiPo batteries are supposed to prevent that

These battery controllers can do stupid things if misconfigured and are at least partly controllable by the OS, maybe you even can flash firmware. If there is no additional "dumb" circuitry enforcing some limits to protect the battery there may be cases where it is possible to do real damage.

In theory the battery controllers are airgapped or at least communicating with the host via a very limited protocol such that they're unlikely to have "remotely" exploitable vulnerabilities.

In practice probably nothing. It probably will happen sooner or later, and then manufacturers will start taking security of this kind of thing seriously.

Maybe lots of extreme cases, like wrapping up the phone to try to overheat it, lots of testing of wireless charging (which seems to be a link between known cases), tests with various cables/chargers, maybe trying to get the phone wet...

> First of all, you cannot take such a dramatic step, losing face, when you have no idea what went wrong, and what caused the problems.

They already lost face with a bit mismanaged and not so customer friendly replacement procedure and then again delivering dangerously faulty items. It's reasonable from a marketing perspective to end the disaster once and for all. "Oh you own a Note 7? Are you sure it's the really really really not exploding one?"

> So it's more likely the battery controller. Which would be trivial to fix once identified and analyzed.

And if it's not? Is e.g. the possibility of the too dense packaging damaging the battery completely ruled out?

Given the amount of Samsung products I've had fail, as well as colleagues who have had similar experiences, I consider them to be a sub-par brand.

Think Chineseium, but a bit further south.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2016/09/29...

Ayds (pronounced AIDS) appetite suppressant candy. After the renaming of GRIDS to AIDS.

One of the most high-profile cases I can think of is the Tylenol murders and subsequent recall. The J&J handling of the problem is actually a textbook case of how to handle this kind of thing properly.

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

Edit: I commented before reading the article and just noticed that this incident was mentioned in the article itself.

There's a whole area of business called "crisis management." Some of the more famous case studies are the Tylenol poisoning case, the Ford Pinto controversy and lawsuit, the Valdez oil spill, Deepwater Horizon, the Firestone tire controversy, and it wasn't even that long ago that there was a small case of mass hysteria regarding Toyotas accelerating all on their own that managed to spread to other brands of cars before people realized that these were just careless drivers. As for abandoning a new product, I suppose there's not that many industries where you come out with regular updates like this every couple of years and it's a big deal. I know Microsoft has rebranded a couple of products before. They rolled out Windows 7 instead of trying to convince everyone that Vista was all fixed and not as bad as they say. I suspect this will be a similar case. Hold off until the controversy dies down, then basically just release the current iteration of their phone when people calm down and they can make sure the thing barely runs warm ever.

Not even very expensive or difficult to do. A small group of people could coordinate such a thing pretty easily.

You can see a single opinion has taken over the internet where everyone is convinced any Note 7 in existence is a ticking time bomb that can kill you at any moment.

There were less then that many shark attacks last year. People are still terrified of sharks.

Not a perfect analogy but people are terrified of things that are incredibly unlikely. It's legitimately hard for a phone manufacturer. 0.00001% is too many explosions if you sell a couple million phones.

Wouldn't surprise me a bit.

I remember testing a wireless charging kit for my S4 while in China. The charger itself was rated 5V 500mA, but when I put my phone on it, the Ampere app reported 1900mA charging current and the screen started showing strong, wave-like distortions. I'm only glad the phone survived the experience.