Samsung Permanently Discontinues Galaxy Note 7 (twitter.com)

After the replacement units of Galaxy Note 7 also started to catch fire, Samsung is now permanently discontinuing its latest flagship smartphone (Editor's note: the link could be paywalled; alternate source), the company said today. The news comes a day after Samsung halted sales of Note 7 once again and began asking users to return the device. So far nearly 50 incidents of Note 7 causing fires have been reported. More importantly, many people have been physically injured with their new Galaxy phone catching fire. WSJ reports: Samsung said in a filing with South Korean regulators on Tuesday that it would permanently cease sales of the device, a day after it announced a temporary halt to production of the smartphones. "Taking our customer's safety as our highest priority, we have decided to halt sales and production of the Galaxy Note 7," the company said. The move comes on a day when Samsung shares tumbled 8%, its biggest one-day decline in eight years, amid increasing pressure after a new string of reported smartphone fires in the U.S.

Comments

This is not even the most hilarious news

[drinkypoo]

The US CPSC has asked consumers to power down all Samsung Galaxy Note 7 phones, whether original or replacement. As in, permanently.

Level of disaster prevention

[DrYak]

Considering that the charger is in the phone itself

This circuitry's job is "only" to take care of the lithium cells.
It's a very critical task (avoid over current, avoid over voltage, avoid over heating, avoid over charge, avoid too fast charging, avoid a deep dis-charge, refuse to charge after a dangerously too deep discharge, etc. Basically Lithium has a tendency to explode if you look it the wrong way).
But it still only just this task.
It guarantees nothing else beyond this task.

and all the usb cable does is provide 5v power to the phone

THAT is the point of failure.
Everything assumes that the cable will provide more or less around 5v.
And there's circuitry to shut down the input if veers a a little bit too much away from the safe zone around 5v.

But some ultra-cheap no-name chargers are built hastily.
To save costs and speed up deliveries, the circuitry tends to be over simplified and the skip on some security features.

The cheapest sub-5$ chargers ARE NOT fail safe.

how could the cable cause the battery to catch fire?

The shitty after-market charger could over heat, melt some electrical paths, and suddenly wire it's output path straight to the 100-240V AC input.

Suddenly this USB charger has managed to transform your 5v USB charging cable into the USB cousin of The "Etherkiller".

And the security inside most smartphones was never meant to be exposed to 100-240V AC 10-20A.
The 5W it usually operates at is magnitude smaller than what can be delivered when such a fault happens.

At that point everything overheats massively and catches fire:
- charger, cable, whole smartphone...
Even if the battery by some magic wasn't exposed to the shock, the subsequent fire of everything around it will make it explode.

In other words (incoming ob. car analogy !) you're complaining that the wind-shield of your car is damaged although it was supposed to be bullet proof when in practice the whole street was levelled by a nuke dropped from low-orbit.

Final score:

Smartphone : 0
USB-killer : 1