Samsung Galaxy S8 will be a no-show at MWC, exec says The great and the good attending next month’s Mobile World Congress won’t be getting a sneak peek at Samsung latest premier Galaxy S8 smartphone after all, a company exec has confirmed. Sammy today went public on its investigation into the costly Note 7 debacle - it blamed the battery makers who built cells that contained …
As above, bring back removable batteries.
I'm still using the Note 4 which isn't exactly chunky, and the battery can be changed out in seconds for a little over a tenner.
This obsession with shaving tenths of millimetres off the thickness of a device has to stop. Ultimately this has been a major contributing factor to the Note 7 problems and all because Samsung are obsessed with copying Apple's design language.
The S7 edge may look beautiful but looking at it causes the glass to scratch badly, let alone inserting and removing it from the Gear VR. We need practicality and not pretty phones please.
Obviously not enough.
But I suspect the problem was related as to what kind of testing was done: you would be amazed at what people actually do with their phones and anticipating this can be very hard.
I'm not a consumer electronics engineer so I'm not going to speculate but I do wonder from the report as to whether pressure sensitivity (such as being in an airplane) might have pushed things beyond design tolerance on some devices. No excuse, of course, but remember the number of reported incidents versus the number of devices actually sold.
@Charlie
Maybe your right, but the article earlier suggests it was the way the batteries were constructed that caused the problems, and I'd have thought other testing would have identified some of the problems. Even simply deconstructing random samples might have shown the poor processes, such as lack of insulation tape or poorly executed electrode terminals etc., and that's before live testing in the device itself.
Mind that's all assuming the reports true.
Mind that's all assuming the reports true.
They may all be true but also incomplete. Samsung's initial response indicated that they thought there was a construction / design problem in batteries from one supplier. This turned out to be an optimistic and, ultimately, very expensive assumption as we're now learning. For whatever reasons the design flaws in the batteries only became apparent once they were in the devices. Alongside pressure and the usual bashing we give our phones, you've also got lots and lots of dodgy power supplies.
The key thing will be the lessons learned both in terms of design, specification, testing and approval processes: is someone really going to stop the launch of something that has been in development for 18 months?
As all Li-Ion batteries are potentially explosive it's important to get regulators onboard here. I can see arguments both for and against mandating removable batteries: makes recalls a whole lot easier; knock-off replacement batteries are known to be safety risk. Getting the regulators onboard also makes it easier to fight off competition from no-name Chinese makers who give even less of a shit about safety and one of the reasons why Samsung went ahead with this particular specification was in response to a highly competitive market. Had it worked out as intended, it should have insulated Samsung a bit more from the cut-throat competition.
The flaming Note 7 was only released in South Korea and the US in August. It was destined to arrive in the UK next but was scrapped when reports of the device's incendiary habits started to show up.
It was released in UK. Yes, the recall did happen before it became generally available, but I do believe anyone who had pre-ordered did receive their Note 7.
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