The Fatal Mistake That Doomed Samsung’s Galaxy Note | Hacker News Reader

The Fatal Mistake That Doomed Samsung’s Galaxy Note

wsj.com

36 pointsssclafani36 comments

As an avid iPhone user who does want to see Apple succeed. I genuinely feel horrible for Samsung. You can say whatever you want about corporate management at any company but at the bottom of the pole are hard working engineers who put so much time and effort into their work. The team that built the iris scanner must have worked incredibly hard with cutting edge technology to make that work in time. So the whole team deserves a ton of credit for the device. I really hope they don't discontinue the line, I hope they just keep doing great work and I believe customers will give them a chance.

The tech industry is awesome because of the beautiful (and incessant) competition. But at the end of the day, I think we all feel for the challenges that come with this line of work. When a device bends, melts, explodes; a product leads customers astray or doesn't live up to hype; that's really unfortunate.

> I really hope they don't discontinue the line

As in, stop making a 5.5"+ phone with stylus? They definitely won't. They'll just have to come up with a new name because the Note name is tarnished

Is it? I would've thought the samsung brand was tarnished more than the note brand.

No just the note brand people are still buying Galaxy S7 by the millions.

But I don't think they're gonna ditch the Samsung brand

I expected the article to say what made the phones catch fire.

This is why I check the comments first. Thank you.

Saved us all a click. In the end doesn't even matter because I can't read the article anyway. It's behind a sign-in wall.

Use the "web" link to avoid the WSJ paywall.

That's getting old. I don't use the web link anymore either.

Why is it getting old? Still working for me at least.

Clicking the link, then backpedaling to click the 'web' link. It works but it's not generally worth it.

Most posts, I'll open the article and comments. Read the article, then the comments. For WSJ posts, I'll load the comments, then decide if I want to bother with the Google trick. If I'm at work, I'll probably skip the whole post, because even if I'm interested in the topic, the Google trick doesn't work there.

They're the only place I see regularly where I have to do some workaround to view the content. They clearly have the intention of finding paying users, and I have no interest in paying. Using work-arounds to bypass that brings it more starkly to mind, with a little twinge of almost-guilt each time. It's easier to just skip the story, unless it's something extraordinarily interesting.

Defective battery according to CNet: https://www.cnet.com/news/why-is-samsung-galaxy-note-7-explo...

Even replacement phones caught fire, they blamed the batteries.

Even this article is inconclusive... There has been no definitive cause.

My initial presumption was shoddy batteries+ quick charge 3.0 extra fast charging + hot Qualcomm 820 just to add.

It was first Samsung phone to use quick charge 3.0. If there was a battery defect, rapid charging didn't help.

This is what I'm wondering. Did they fail to adequately test the quick charge feature or do they have a supply chain issue? The Nokia phone explosions were caused by Nokia accidentally buying counterfeit batteries because they sold more units that they had anticipated. A startup I worked for back then was created to solve that particular problem (Verical).

No sh&t, battery? Who would have thought? I assumed it was CPU heated to sillicon's ignition temperature.

what a click-bait title! tl;dr: Recalling early based on the assumption that the fault was with one of the batteries' suppliers. Nothing about the root cause issue in this article.

They don't know the root cause.

Which is what made me interested in reading the article--from the headline I thought it had finally been found.

I'm curious too, and I'm probably going to stay interested until they finally conclude something. Hundreds of thousands of handsets returned, billions of dollars lost, and nobody knows why.

According to the article, the mistake was admitting there was a problem and recalling the phones.

If that's what Wall Street calls a "mistake", then I don't know what they'd call the engineering problem(s) that caused the fires in the first place.

According to the article, the mistake was saying it was the batteries and then doing a recall to replace the batteries, even though they weren't actually sure that's what the issue was. When it turned out they were wrong, and the replacement phones were catching fire as well, it made Samsung look a lot worse and led to them killing the product entirely.

Obviously, the battery is the fire energy source since it is the only part housing a massive energy.

Is it be possible the software (e.g. the battery management firmware) causes this? A bug is never far away, nor is an intended malfunction (hack).

To get around the Subscribe block just copy the title, use google.com and put the title in quotes. The reference from Google.com will get around the subscription wall if your IP has not viewed too many articles that month

Or just use the 'web' link under the title.

There's no "right move" in this situation. If they delayed the recall and it was proved the battery was the culprit, then then there will be reports that the company knew it was the battery weeks earlier and didn't do anything about it. They had a tough choice to make, and they took the option that puts the consumers' well-being first, and that is the right choice in my opinion. It might be the right choice financially, but not everything is about money.

Following the 'web' link doesn't seem to get me through the paywall anymore. How am I supposed to read this article?

Don't bother. The article doesn't actually deliver what the headline promises.

I had the first note 7, LOVED it to bits.. then sent it back for a replacement, got a S7 Edge loaner.. hated it. Got the Note 7 replacement, Was back in heaven.

Sent the Note 7 back, and have now got a Note 5 64GB. I like it and will keep using it... but I still miss the Note 7. Am eagerly awaiting the Note 8 or whatever is coming next from Samsung.

My understanding is that the problem is trying to speed up the charging cycle and the battery not being able to dump the excessive temperature. For normal use I assume the phone is able to cope.

I imagine that if the managers had delayed the recall and the problem turned out to be as they originally suspected, that would have been their fatal mistake.

The article suggests that the other option wasn't "delay the recall" but "kill the phone". The fact that "kill the phone" came after "send supposedly safe replacements" is what was fatal, not the early recall.

i.e. they thought they had enough evidence to damn one battery manufacturer, but the truth was the problem was elsewhere, and they still don't know. Faced with continuing problems and no known cause, if they'd pre-emptively pulled the phone, the hope is that they'd be seen as looking out for their customers.

'Dendrites and Pits: Untangling the Complex Behavior of Lithium Metal Anodes through Operando Video Microscopy'

http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/acscentsci.6b00260

Anything specific you'd like to highlight?

I'm not knowledgeable enough to say, but there are problems with these kind of batteries overheating, especially on recharging. Pumping electricity through a material produces heat. If it has nowhere to go then you end up with a fire and toxic fumes. The solution on airplanes being to put the battery in a sealed metal box with a pipe to vent any toxic fumes to the outside of the hull.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_787_Dreamliner_battery_...

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