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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.
The US CPSC has asked consumers to power down all Samsung Galaxy Note 7 phones, whether original or replacement. As in, permanently.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Ok I admit that I use iOS devices more than android. But why the hate towards Samsung with the good riddance.
I would much rather see them fix the phone so it's users will have a nice safe phone. Vs what it would be now a possibility exploding collectors item. That in 20 years you can sell to a collector for about a grand.
Samsung has been pushing the quality of Android phones. They are no longer cheap Apple rip offs but their own phone market. Where Apple has to take notice and the competition impress their phone as well.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
I heard about the touch disease. But not the phones exploding when using approved devices. There were some issues a while back where people got some third party chargers that they were plugging there phone straight into the AC socket.
As for the Touch Disease it is a problem but it isn't affecting people's safety.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
It's not a dupe. The previous story talked about Samsung halting sales of Note 7. The company has since changed its stand on the matter. Please read before commenting.
Heads are going to roll all around after an event like this one.
Somebody will probably end up writing a book on what went on inside, because I imagine that the internal meetings had some serious drama involved.
I hope there's going to be a post-mortem at some point, because it would be very interesting to find out what went wrong in the end. Rogue manufacturer? Bad quality control? Maybe the phone doing something wrong with charging, as somebody suggested on reddit?
I could care less, but then I wouldn't have posted at all.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
Please read before commenting.
Wow, you really must be new here.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
How is this possible if only 50 phone fires have been reported and the majority of those reports are unsubstantiated? Is this a new use of the word "many" that I have been unaware of? Does the word "many" mean "extremely few compared to the number of sold phones" in this context?
I think "many" can legitimately mean "more than one single freak accident" in the context of an exploding consumer device.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Kind of funny how people call Apple users "worshippers" and "fanboys" while at the same time pretending Samsung's exploding phones are just a minor problem that people shouldn't make such a fuss about, on the same level as a touch display glitch.
Worshipping Samsung a little too much, perhaps?
if they are unwilling to make a phone with user replaceable battery, serves them right. this could have been so much cheaper for them.
Get some perspective man.
Samsung's phones are a health hazard. They could kill you.
Apples touch disease, though unnaceptable from a consumer point of view, falls squarely in the domain of "first world problems". They won't kill you. They won't harm you. They'll just cause you a slight annoyance (having to ask Apple for a replacement, which, depending on specifics, they might do for free).
Also, the instances of Apple devices catching fire are extremely rare, and are caused by mishandling the device (like, for example, using some crap charger).
Samsung's instances are caused by a defect that they themselves have already admitted existing. Though they haven't exactly clarified what they've fucked up, leaving people - such as yourself - a thin hope that it might just be a bad batch of batteries, totally ignoring that a) replacing the batteries didn't fix the problem and b) that there are only a handful of battery suppliers, and they supply everyone else.
A manufacturing defect on the batteriez would not just affect Samsung devices, they would affect everyone's devices.
Who are you accusing of hating here? The Wall Street Journal for publishing this article? Samsung for discontinuing the model? Or maybe msmash for submitting the story here?
Is this not a newsworthy topic? Is this not a current red-hot issue in the tech world? Is this not news for nerds?
How is it that you think that this is a political issue, or one driven by hate? Do you think that we should meekly accept phones that explode on us? You accuse others of being fanbois, but I can't think of any excuse to wanting us to remain silent on this issue other than you being a fanboi yourself.
Now, Samsung, kindly go back to producing 10 and 12 inch tablets with proper S Pen support and Miracast.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
And yet the most recent bit of information on Samsung's own website is this release which is the one quoted in the previous story. Their investor relations site doesn't contain any references to a permanent end of production either.
So are these stories reporting new facts and Samsung just hasn't updated its websites yet, or are they misunderstanding the earlier release, inferring the word "permanent" when it wasn't in the original information?
Considering that the charger is in the phone itself and all the usb cable does is provide 5v power to the phone, how could the cable cause the battery to catch fire?
Pretty easily, if your name is Wile E. Coyote.
Wow, can you imagine the amount of upset this will cause to the supply chain and also to the thousands of people involved in designing, building, and who were supposed to sell this phone?
The assembly and manufacture of these phones employs thousands of people, spins up parts supply chains for years (and already did for months in preparation), and was planned to use a significant chunk of the global capacity of glass, machine tools, electronic components, transportation, labor, etc. Now which all will have to find new places to go, which will take more than a few months.
Regardless of how you feel about Samsung in general, the "hidden", not as public, effects of this very big mistake will affect many, many peoples' lives in a real way (aside from a handful of people at the top).
It's totally legitimate to contrast the pooh-poohing of Samsung completely abandoning a flagship product over safety problems with how Slashdot would be reacting if this were Apple
I bet that at some point one of these two tings have been brought up by engineers within the company:
Why was this information not passed on? What manager didn't react to it?
This goes way beyond a simple hardware issue.
Moderating this as flamebait is silly. Having a user-replaceable battery is a desirable feature, at least for me.
To be fair to Samsung, they acted quickly (for a large corporation) and did the right thing with an recall and then halting production. Compare to Apple, who typically deny the problem for a few years and then create a repair scheme for people who didn't already discard the device or pay to have the hardware fixed. Usually seems to require a class action lawsuit too.
Samsung aren't perfect by a long way, and I don't buy their hardware any more because of lack of features and their annoying Android skin, but compared to Apple... Well, you can't really compare them, can you? Apple knew about the bending problems, didn't do anything, denied warranty replacements and is now in denial about the inevitable failures resulting from repeated flexing a year down the line.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
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For small pocket devices WE HAVE EXCEEDED PEAK LI-ON BATTERY AREA and especially LENGTH. Samsung should retool the G7 to contain two or three smaller 'proven' Lion battery packages with separate charging circuits. It is possible that a manufacturing variance ultimately related to area is fooling the charge circuit and making these more susceptible to overcharge. There is also physical stress, another trigger. Batteries should not straddle the middle of the device where the most butt-pocket deformation will occur.
<blink>down the rabbit hole</blink>
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
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A simple google search would answer that for you.
http://mashable.com/2016/10/11...
"The news comes via Associated Press and the Wall Street Journal, and the difference between yesterday's news is in the wording. On Monday, Samsung said it would "temporarily adjust" the production of the Galaxy Note7. Now, the company's move is permanent. "
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
If true then that means the phones certainly were defective by design and should be a lesson to all manufacturers. So it wouldn't be funny at all, but hopefully would be a strong lesson.
In this case, we know that the problems stem from a bad physical design primarily.
It required a lot of force to make it happen (Samsung phones were easier to bend but more flexible),
Sure. If you read all of the test results backwards.
I don't believe that this is anything to do with the physical size of the cells; tablets and laptops have much bigger cells. This is more likely a new anode material - to provide a higher energy density - that maybe wasn't completely understood before it was shipped. If you don't understand it, you can't keep it safe. The issues could also be related to hotspots on the battery, where circuitry close to one point on the cell causes non-uniform heating - you then see a catastrophic failure even though the battery temp sensor is reading a safe temperature. All speculation though, obviously.
I've not kept up with the latest Li-Ion tech but as you see the nominal & max charge voltage creep up from 3.7v/4.2v, that's a sign of new anode tech. Last time I looked we were up to 3.8v/4.32v or so.
Generally, battery engineers are HUGELY conservative people. They know they're responsible for a potential bomb that often resides millimeters from a human body; better safe than sorry.
Note that carriers - initially at&t as I remember - started requiring that devices pass IEEE1725 certification for battery safety in... I think 2009? This submission and testing process is pretty comprehensive including fault tree analysis and being able to keep the battery safe even with two concurrent failures (eg overvoltage protection circuit dying AND current control being lost). I would guess Samsung had to pass this certification, which is supposed to ensure that people aren't cutting corners.
For a LOT more detail see http://www.ctia.org/docs/default-source/default-document-library/ctia-certification-requirements-for-battery-system-compliance-to-nbsp-ieee-1725.pdf?sfvrsn=0
I used to work at Apple on iPhone hardware, and back in the day we tested competitor hardware to see what they did in IEEE1725 cases. The old Samsung phones definitely did NOT enforce the safe discharge temperature limits - as I remember we had Samsung Galaxy (first version) running happily at 90C which was not compliant... an iPhone would have entered thermal trap and shut down totally about 30C before that point.
(posting as AC because, well, Apple)
You have it backwards. When the USB charger voltage droops, the phone (or other recharging device) will dissipate more heat as the phone's charging process becomes less efficient. Apple's USB chargers generally don't sag like some cheap equivalents do.
It's easy to monitor this using simple and cheap USB tools like this one which report both voltage and current:
https://www.amazon.com/PortaPo...
(or many other equivalents)
Charge control is done within the phone, generally by a dedicated chip which also monitors battery temperature. In some cheap 'power bricks', the charge control is done via a microprocessor rather than a dedicated charge control chip, but this isn't common in more valuable products.
Li ion batteries have a separate protection circuit which monitors over voltage, under voltage and over-current (either direction). It opens the circuit when triggered.
Battery safety is controlled by IEC 62133, which was generated in the EU, but has been adopted in the US, too.