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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.
I understand how sensitive authorities will be to any battery issue on the Note 7 post-recall, but nearly every Li-Ion phone model has had these kinds of thermal runaway events, including the iPhone. It's premature to start talking about a second recall before the investigation on the Southwest Airlines event has even started in earnest.
It's common sense and physics. The additional plastic of the battery housing, the internal space in the phone to make a user-serviceable space inside, the exterior cover and latching mechanism to hold it on, etc. All of those things take up space and add weight. That space could be more lithium or a smaller, lighter phone.
You can convince me otherwise when you can demonstrate two designs (one with an integrated battery and one removable) that yield the same battery capacity and device size & weight using the same battery technology.
Fixing Boeing's problem didn't require replacing the entire plane.