Samsung set a fire under battery-makers to make the Galaxy Note 7 flaming brilliant

Are VW / Samsung / Theresa May employing the same advisors?

These three have a lot more in common than meets the eye.

Each has sheer contempt for what actually matters. Staying No.1 (self survival) more important than telling the truth, even when things unravel. All have proven themselves corrupt / manipulating in order to achieve their goals.

When you have a British Prime Minister using the same techniques as VW / Samsung, why are we surprised by any of this?

So the fires were the result of...

Marketing making unrealistic demands on engineering for a "feature" that almost no one cares about. Just about everyone I know would quite happily sacrifice a mm or two in thickness to get a phone with real world battery life that can be measured in days instead of hours.

This constant push by manufacturers for thinner and thinner phones will be the death of us - possibly literally.

If they were that shoddily built, how come they didn't explode on their first charge? Sounds like a conspiracy to me :-)

Amazing that somehow only Samsung was affected

Sure, every phone will have the odd fire here and there, and have since they first started using lithium ion batteries. Manufacturing defect, phone gets dropped and the battery is damaged, faulty charger, or whatever. But the Note 7 was unique in having a FAR higher rate of problems, which started immediately out of the gate, rather than evenly distributed over months and years as is typically the case.

I smell a whitewash here. There's no way the phone was not in some way part of the problem. It strains credulity that TWO suppliers (one of which is Samsung SDI, i.e. basically itself!) had the same problems and somehow didn't notice. And what's their excuse for switching to the Chinese supplier after the initial recall, thinking it was OK, until they started blowing too?

This snow job makes me wonder if they've actually identified the problem and are covering it up to save face, or after all this investigation couldn't figure it out so they decided to pick a likely sounding culprit, blame themselves in a "I guess my flaw is that I try too hard to please others" way, and hope that whatever confluence of troubles caused the Note 7 to go so wrong was a one time thing.

"placing anodes and cathodes in locations where they were likely to come into contact"

Doesn't seem to have happened, judging from the limited summary you're printed. Different parts of the negative electrode may have touched each other. The negative electrode touched the "positive tab". If the actual electrodes had touched, it seems pretty unlikely that affected batteries would have survived any attempt at charging.

Taking responsibility for doing too god a job

Well that's a new one, for sure. A refreshing change from "almost nobody was impacted", but given the importance of the impact on the people affected, it would have apparently been too callous even for a multinational conglomerate to say that. And it would probably have cost a lot in yet a bit more negative publicity.

Which is what this whole PR exercise is about - drowning the negative in positive, reponsible, taking-all-blame spin. That's because the whole fiasco was prohibitively expensive in both money and reputation, and Samsung is desperate to get some brownie points in Public Opinion.

Everything in here has been carefully crafted to make people believe that the investigation was thorough, the cause forgivable, the motive noble. Honor is preserved by taking the blame yet saying that Samsung equipment was absolutely not responsible. A brilliant exercise.

Well I'm against monopolies, so I hope Samsung will stay in the game for a while longer, but I don't buy the whitewash. A battery that is not of the specified size (how can they possible make something bigger than expected these days ?), that lacks insulation and has a slew of other manufacturing defects is not something that should have made its way on to the market, period. With the amount of defects listed, the fact that it did get to the market demonstrates an appalling lack of QA in every part of the manufacturing chain.

I'm guessing that this situation has been a long time in the making. Such absence of control didn't happen overnight, it is the result of complacency and the immense pressure of the market.

Maybe it is time to get off the wheel for a bit and take a breather ? Nobody will die if a new model takes a year and a half to get done instead of twelve months.

hmm

I hope El Reg didn't take notes...

Comparison of outrage

I think the real shock with the Note 7 saga, is that the level of outrage on these battery fires seems to be substantially higher than that which surrounded the battery fires onboard the Boeing 787 Dreamliners.

The potential loss of life with the Boeing problems was much higher than the Note 7 as far as I can see, yet most people seem to have largely forgotten about that one now.

In conclusion

It still smell fishy.

It is as if they needed someone to blame, but it really wasn't their fault.

Think about this. How hard is it to test each part of the potential problem source?

One test for the battery itself (wired up to test voltage, charging and release, etc)

One test for the power chip (use a stable battery for testing)

One test for the phone pressure (add pressure sensor for a sample Note 7)

One test for the software (use a stable phone with the software)

It is as if the main problem is in the design, but they didn't want to state it as the reason.

Turning point? I doubt it, but hey...

As initially understood then, a battery fault, unfortunately exacerbated by a different fault in the replacement. Having hardwired the battery as so many manufacturers have chosen to do, Samsung have massively paid the price by having to cancel the device altogether, for a mixture of perceptive and economic reasons. As one of the last manufacturers to stop using easily replaceable batteries, could they make a move that's positive for both the company and consumers by being one of the first to admit they were wrong and reverse that policy? Baked-in batteries (more literally than Samsung ever intended) are pure cynical marketing hype and a sustainability disaster, a technological "solution" to customers increasingly hanging on to handsets long after the mobile networks can fleece them for overpriced contracts. Yes, they enable slimmer handsets, but that's pure marketing guff when the upshot is more fragile devices (yay, more early upgrades and expensive contracts!) for the sake of a fraction of a millimetre. Let's have some sense back!

Give it a rest

Your correspondent suspects the idea Samsung wants us all to take away is that it pushed so hard…

… that safety considerations were ignored with disastrous, though fortunately not life-threatening, effects.

While you're busy beating on Samsung you might also mention Takata whose problems with airbags were slightly more alarming. Or any of the many similar cases. For various reasons (cost-cutting is not the only one) products are released onto the market with defects. Some of these can and should be avoided. But before we get on our high horses, we might take a moment to consider how complicated some of this stuff is.

That said, while Samsung is handling the Note 7 extremely well, it's got a potentially bigger issue related to the influence peddling scandal in South Korea.

Cheapo devices do burn

...or at least, the cheap tablet I bought direct from China melted. It probably would have burned if I hadn't caught it in time.

(They exchanged the remains for a refurbished tablet, not a new one.)

Sounds like greed over sound design and engineering.

I find it difficult to believe that there were 3 separate faults from two manufactures that all resulted in the phones catching fire. A single point of failure is a bad thing, but they are saying that there were 3 major (life in danger) errors that shipped with these phones.

Had they listed one single major problem then I would agree with the report. To me it sounds like they asked 700 really smart people to find a way to deflect blame away from the phone and onto the batteries.

Problems can and do happen, and sometimes they take years to be known. The problems they listed here should have been caught, and really the fact that there are 3 separate problems with Samsung saying they are happy to keep using the same suppliers... Yea, doesn't bode well for the truth that.

I worked for a company that made high-precision measurement equipment, a whole line of our gear was faulty. The solution was for us to tell the customer that it was in spec when they purchased it and the problem must be somewhere in their own systems. I tested 100% of our kit one day and it all failed (nearly lost my job), but they did eventually fix it (Faulty master measurement kit in Germany, every product for years that came out was actually failed spec). After I did that they still didn't admit there was a fault, we just slowly and quietly replaced the ones that were returned. It's not like they were used in a nuke power plant or anything - err, yea they were...

To this day I think they still blame the customer and don't admit that there was ever a problem.

The batteries, they burn!

It is an interesting question why there aren't a lot more LiIon batteries bursting into flames in products where the only objective is cheap. My first guess is that cheap suppliers just have not (yet) reached the flaming edge power densities where spectacular events would commonly result from failures.

In the meantime, considering the penetration of supply chains by AliBabas, I'll keep on charging my lithium ion batteries on a metal table top. Except for the Jesus Phone, you have to have some Faith!

unnamed factor

There was really one reason that Samsung had to eat $5 billion on the Note 7.... Greed.

Note 1-4 all had removable batteries. I just replaced the battery in my Note 4 last month and I can continue to use it for 2 or 3 more years, if I choose.

Samsung saw what Apple was doing (making disposable $800 devices that were not easy to change batteries in, because they were "hard wired" into the device). Someone, in some meeting, at some time said "you know, if we do that, once the battery dies, they will HAVE to buy another phone from us!" and the other attendees said "YOU'RE BRILLIANT!"

I passed on Note 5 and 6 for this very reason and was almost duped into buying the 7 because it was obvious the days of exchangeable batteries in Notes were over. Then, explodey stuff started happening and I cancelled my order. Thank God.

This debacle would have cost Samsung about $20 per unit to fix, if they had stayed to the removable battery design that made the Note a great phablet to begin with, but alas, they thought they could make a quick buck. Well, now it sounds like they haven't learned and are going to try to make the batteries more reliable (but it's still going to be a throw away device after the battery eventually fails, which all Lithium Ion batteries do).

My advice Samsung, Note 8 better have a removable battery. Otherwise, I will definitely be jumping ship. I hope everyone follows me in this. They will probably just attribute low sales to their tainted reputation instead of us realizing the truth of why manufacturers embed batteries in their devices.

Right now, I've got over 100 tab 7 tablets that all are worthless because of this same bone-headed design (granted those are slow terrible tablets, but most of them died due to battery failure far before their usefulness would have caused us to decommission them).

Just my 2 cents.