Samsung Could Look To LG For Phone Batteries After Note 7 Debacle (cnet.com)

An anonymous reader writes: Samsung seems to be doing everything within its power to avoid a repeat of the great Galaxy Note 7 battery crisis of 2016. That might even include buying in batteries from LG, according to a report published on Monday. Samsung currently sources its phone batteries from Samsung SDI, a subsidiary of the company, and China's Amperex Technology, but could be set to diversify its battery suppliers by inking a deal with fellow South Korean company LG Chem. Reuters cites the Chosun Ilbo newspaper as saying there is "more than a 90 percent chance" of Samsung signing up LG to provide batteries for its phones starting in the second half of 2017.

Comments

Re:My third first post this week

[thegarbz]

Do LG know something Samsung doesn't about batteries or is Samsung just passing the buck?

"We'll give you the lucrative battery contract but you have to guarantee to cover any liabilities..."

Nothing special. Battery chemistry is a bit on the iffy side for these types of batteries. Poor chemistry has been the cause of many fires and I suspected it in this case as well, despite what a bunch of no-name software developers looking to get their startup in the newspaper by pulling apart a device and declaring themselves experts in hardware have said about it.

I thought it wasn't the battery per-se

[dmomo]

I wondered the same thing. I understood that the battery itself wasn't the problem, but Samsung's insistence on making the device as small as possible, taking away clearance space that the battery otherwise needs to operate safely and efficiently.

Re:I thought it wasn't the battery per-se

[UnknowingFool]

As far as I know, Samsung hasn't really determined the actual cause of the issue. With a dozen incidents out of millions of phones, it's not purely a design flaw but a combination of manufacturing/design. Personally I'm speculating that some counterfeit batteries got into Samsung's supply chain and Samsung can't tell everyone that or confidence in Samsung will fall further.

Cut out the middle man

[gsslay]

Just buy an LG.

Re:Cut out the middle man

[I4ko]

And give up to planned obsolescence? OLED degrade with time, in 2 years they will be dim and uneven. Why the hell would you buy an OLED?

Pretty stunning if true

[Nova Express]

As rival chaebol, Samsung and LG hate each other and avoid doing business with each other whenever possible. (It was a huge deal when LG and Hyundai merged their semiconductor businesses together into Hynix, and that was only because building new wafer fabs had gotten too expensive to keep going it alone.) Especially since LG is smaller than Samsung. Samsung must really have felt that was the only way to solve their problem...

Buy batteries ...

[PPH]

... from Boeing. They come in a nice steel case.

Re: better options

[Voyager529]

No, so that if the issue is expanding batteries, the batteries can be made thinner, or they'll pop the back off, prompting the need to have the battery replaced, or so users can buy batteries from Anker or ZeroLemon (or LG), or so Samsung can ship a box of batteries to each Verizon store and let users swap them with be batteries as a 45-second exchange rather than spending an obscene amount of money for RMAs in hazmat boxes...really, the only reason the phone needed to be recalled as a complete unit is because the batteries weren't removable.

While yes, Apple, LG, and Samsung have produced unibody phones that didn't blow up, I've yet to hear a reason why removable batteries are a bad thing for consumers with the sole exception of anorexia.