Slashdot Mirror
Samsung Could Face Second Recall As US Probes Burnt Phone (bloomberg.com)
The Federal Aviation Administration and the Consumer Product Safety Commission are investigating Wednesday's incident, when a passenger's phone emitted smoke on a Southwest Airlines plane readying for departure from Louisville, Kentucky. Bloomberg reports: "If it's the fixed phone and it started to smoke in his pocket, I'm going to guess there'll be another recall," said Pamela Gilbert, a former executive director of the consumer agency. "That just doesn't sound right." Samsung has been engulfed in crisis since the Note 7 smartphones began to burst into flames just days after hitting the market in August. The Suwon, South Korea-based company announced last month that it would replace all 2.5 million phones sold globally at that point. Samsung said it had uncovered the cause of the battery fires and that it was certain new phones wouldn't have the same flaws. The first indications of the existing recall's financial impact could be seen Friday with the company's release of earnings that rose at the slowest pace in five quarters. Operating income increased just 5.5 percent to 7.8 trillion won ($7 billion) in the three months ended Sept. 30.
As a user, I'd much prefer the water proofing, smaller overall size / greater capacity, and other benefits that come from an integrated battery.
Stop believing the Apple sales pitches. None of those things is incompatible with a removable battery.
No sig today...
All of this would have been avoidable with removable batteries.
Lithium-Ion batteries are required to implement five separate safety systems to prevent these combustion events.
Samsung is having quality-control issues. If the batteries were removable, the situation would not be trashing the company, but this does serve poetic justice.
There is a little problem with that... Your watch needs a new O-Ring every time you open it and replace the battery. Otherwise it's VERY likely that it will no longer be 200m water resistant.
Besides, in order to get away with such a thin O-ring, you need 2 flat surfaces that do not move against each other. Easy to do in a watch, a lot harder in a phone that is much bigger.
3) This is a phone with the original fault, unfixed. They haven't ruled that out yet.
From The Verge article on the incident:
More worrisome is the fact that the phone in question was a replacement Galaxy Note 7, one that was deemed to be safe by Samsung. The Verge spoke to Brian Green, owner of the Note 7, on the phone earlier today and he confirmed that he had picked up the new phone at an AT&T store on September 21st. A photograph of the box shows the black square symbol that indicates a replacement Note 7 and Green said it had a green battery icon.
[...]
Running the phone's IMEI (blurred for privacy reasons) through Samsung's recall eligibility checker returns a "Great News!" message saying that Green's Galaxy Note 7 is not affected by the recall.
Unless some fraud took place (either someone swapping an original device into his new box or the guy trying to pass off an original device as a new one for some twisted reason), we can say that it's NOT an original device.