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."

Comments

Ha ha

[Anonymous Coward]

Sent from my iPhone 7.

Re: Ha ha

[hcs_$reboot]

Apple fanboi is not trendy anymore. Apple hateboi is the new trend.

Too much thin phones and thin batteries

[samjam]

I think the quest for ever thinner phones and ever thinner batteries is to blame.
I want thicker phones with longer life.

I also think a battery-only recall would have been cheaper, so there is a lot to be said for removable batteries too.
I want user-replaceable batteries

I don't really know what I'm talking about, but I do know what I want.

Re:Too much thin phones and thin batteries

[hcs_$reboot]

This is more a problem of battery management. These Li-ion batteries need a specific and smart power input. Sounds like the embedded driver, probably not firmware updatable, is defective.

Re:Too much thin phones and thin batteries

[rtb61]

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.

Re:Too much thin phones and thin batteries

[Zuriel]

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.

Re:Too much thin phones and thin batteries

[AmiMoJo]

When you rapid charge batteries it can do funny things to the chemistry, and plus you are expecting rapid temperature rise and high current flow that would be the normal danger signs when there is a battery fault like a short. I think it's likely that their batteries are the same quality as ever, it's just that they can't detect when they are about to explode any more because the conditions are too similar to a normal rapid charging session.

Re:Too much thin phones and thin batteries

[dunkelfalke]

Here is what a Galaxy Note7 looks like inside. The CPU is behind the metal cover left of the battery. This is basically how most modern phones look like inside (except Sony, they still have the CPU above the battery).

Re:Too much thin phones and thin batteries

[Dan East]

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.

Re:Impossible

[hcs_$reboot]

Apple is a company who only builds overpriced shit

Overpriced yes, shit no.

Re:more than just thinner

[Billly Gates]

I think its more than just thinner devices. Keep on adding parts and whatnot is the culprit. Apple right can do it right, but Samsung is running into problems trying to do what Apple is doing.

Oh you mean like this?

Re:Impossible

[frnic]

It can't be over priced if the market is bearing that price. The value of any product is exactly what the public is willing to pay for it.

Re: Impossible

[Anonymous Coward]

The thing is the iPhone is not something essential and there are thousands of alternatives out there.

This never happened with my land-line phone!

[King_TJ]

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?)

Re:This never happened with my land-line phone!

[AmiMoJo]

Everyone knows that the thinner it gets the more volatile it is, which is why paper explodes so spectacularly. Just hope they never make a paper thin phone, especially one made out of wood products. Fortunately I hear wood isn't a very good conductor.

Why even bother?

[wkwilley2]

Realistically as other have said....how much money could Samsung have saved if they had made the battery removable and just sent everyone a replacement battery?

If that's not the issue, then obviously that's not going to solve the problem, but the quest for super thin phones is the cause of these issues. Why make a phone this thin if you're just going to put it in an otterbox?

Value of something IS what the market will bear

[sjbe]

That's a dangerous way to think.

Products ARE worth what people are willing to pay for them. That is a cold stone fact. It's not a "dangerous way to think" because it's simply the truth. You fail to acknowledge that truth at your peril. It's like saying gravity is a dangerous way to think. That argument makes no sense because it implies that a law of nature is somehow a point of view. It isn't. Products are worth what the market will bear is in economics as close to a fundamental law of nature as you will find. It's right up there with supply and demand effects on price.

It is that kind of thinking that leads to 500% increases in the cost of life saving drugs just for the heck of it

Which is why most sane countries regulate the price of drugs to avoid that exact circumstance because health care is needed by everyone. And even in the crazy US we regulate a lot of markets (electricity, telephone, water, etc) where there is a risk of a utility abusing its monopoly on a product. The value of a product is what people are willing to pay for it. When the consequences of not paying for it are possible death, the value of that product can be very high if there is no alternative source for it.

So no, the value of something isn't what the market will bear, otherwise you'd be paying millions for clean air.

You are conflating some very different things. First off we ARE paying millions (billions really) for clean air as a society. The price of it is rolled into the cost of the products you buy. Those environmental regulations aren't free. (and that's not a bad thing either) Second, we are perfectly capable of regulating monopolies to keep them from getting out of hand. We do this all the time. Third, the value of something in economic terms absolutely IS what people are willing to pay for it. Some things are public goods and we have to be careful about ensuring they remain so but the value of fresh water or breathable air is tremendously high - we've just organized our legal system to ensure they are available to all.

Re:more than just thinner

[houghi]

From your article:
It appears likely that the phone sustained some damage while it was being transported. The kind of battery used in the iPhone and other handsets are almost always safe, but can be incredibly dangerous â" if they are punctured, they can easily explode or set fire, taking the rest of the phone with it.
The phone did appear to be dented and damaged beyond the kind of issues that would be caused by heat.
But that also suggests that the new problems hitting the iPhone are not on the level of the exploding Note 7, which necessitated a global recall and has been a disaster for the company. No further problems with the iPhone 7 have yet been reported and it appears that the problem is likely to be isolated.

(Emphasis is mine)

Just temporarly?

[BlytheBowman]

It's time for Samsung to consider that phone model deader than a doornail. The bad press is widespread, the jokes about it are still pouring out, people's confedence in the product is lost and never comming back no matter what their marketing droids do. What Samsung needs to do is bury it, and their next product should not even bear the "Galaxy Note" name, otherwise it's financial suicide.