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Samsung Halts Galaxy Note 7 Production Temporarily (wsj.com)
Samsung is halting production of its Galaxy Note 7 smartphone after the replacement units -- the second batch of Note 7 produced -- by Samsung also seemed to be riddled with a similar issue, with nearly half a dozen of explosion and burning issues in the past week alone. Yonhap News Agency, and the WSJ are both reporting that the halt was done in cooperation with safety regulators from South Korea, China and the United States. From a WSJ report: Samsung's move comes after a spate of fresh reports of problems with replacement phones that have been distributed to consumers around the world. While Samsung hasn't confirmed the reports, it said in a statement Friday in response to one report that it would "move quickly to investigate the reported case to determine the cause and will share findings as soon as possible."
Sounds much more like an overheating CPU too close to a way to cheap poorly insulated battery (internal batteries are much cheaper than user replace able batteries). The CPU alters the conditions of the battery, so the battery generates more heat, heating the CPU which heats the battery (higher temperatures more electrical resistance, leading to higher temperatures). So the design is inherently bad and the phone has to be scrapped IMHO they kind of deserve it for removing user replacebale batteries from Notes, https://www.youtube.com/watch?..., I am a bad man ;D.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
This quest for ever thinner phones with their thin batteries is only to blame if you dislike the downsides of pushing technology forward.
Any time you demand a considerable amount of energy storage in a small package, it has a certain amount of danger of catching fire or exploding.
We've randomly seen various models of laptops catch fire or explode too, and many of those weren't all that thin, nor would you describe their batteries as "thin" -- especially compared to any smartphone ever manufactured.
I can't say I know exactly where Samsung is failing this particular time, since competitors have similar sized devices with similar sized batteries that are clearly working more reliably? But it sounds like they wrote things off as a simple battery production defect when it might turn out to be a more complicated problem to fix. (As someone else said - maybe they have the battery sitting too close to the CPU or other chips that help warm it up past a safe operational parameter?)
Products ARE worth what people are willing to pay for them.
No, that is not true under our current system in which you get to hand-wave away externalities. If people had to actually pay the entire cost of a gadget, then it would be true. If the actual environmental cost of production were baked into every device, whether by taxing and spending those revenues on cleanup or by making it more expensive to create the device by controlling emissions and energy consumption up front, then people would be able to make intelligent choices about what something is worth.
Everyone on this planet is subsidizing everything made for everyone else, because we're spending our natural capital in the process.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Phones have temperature sensors and will stop charging if the battery temperature gets too high, or throttle the CPU or even power off entirely if it gets too hot. Unless you leave it on the dash of your car in summer and the device can't control its temperature, heat can't really cause a catastrophic failure like this. It's more likely to be the battery developing an internal short circuit due to a manufacturing fault in my opinion. There's no way to handle that besides better quality control.
The last batch of "fixed" phones that have caught on fire have not even been in use. The last few caught fire during the night when hooked up to a charger. They seem to be catching fire around 4 - 5 AM, which assuming the phone was plugged in at midnight of before, should be after the battery is fully charged. So at first blush it would seem the batteries are being overcharged. However, the phone that caught on fire on the airplane was apparently not in use or plugged in. In fact he said he had turned it off and then the fire began.
My hunch is the batteries are being damaged during the charging process, and once that occurs it's just a ticking time bomb before the layers in the battery come into contact and cause a big exothermic chemical reaction. Often it happens right away, but sometimes not until some other physical factor triggers it.
The original batteries that Samsung thought were the problem probably weren't manufactured quite as well, and thus they simply manifested the overcharging problem more easily. The other manufacturer's batteries in the "fixed" phones have slightly better manufacturing, and thus they can simply stand up to the overcharging abuse a bit better, and since it didn't manifest in Samsung's testing, they assumed it was purely a problem with the other batteries.
Better known as 318230.