
The Fatal Mistake That Doomed Samsung’s Galaxy Note - ssclafani
http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-fatal-mistake-that-doomed-samsungs-galaxy-note-1477248978
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pducks32
As an avid iPhone user who does want to see Apple succeed. I genuinely feel
horrible for Samsung. You can say whatever you want about corporate management
at any company but at the bottom of the pole are hard working engineers who
put so much time and effort into their work. The team that built the iris
scanner must have worked incredibly hard with cutting edge technology to make
that work in time. So the whole team deserves a ton of credit for the device.
I really hope they don't discontinue the line, I hope they just keep doing
great work and I believe customers will give them a chance.

The tech industry is awesome because of the beautiful (and incessant)
competition. But at the end of the day, I think we all feel for the challenges
that come with this line of work. When a device bends, melts, explodes; a
product leads customers astray or doesn't live up to hype; that's really
unfortunate.

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acchow
> I really hope they don't discontinue the line

As in, stop making a 5.5"\+ phone with stylus? They definitely won't. They'll
just have to come up with a new name because the Note name is tarnished

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flukus
Is it? I would've thought the samsung brand was tarnished more than the note
brand.

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xbmcuser
No just the note brand people are still buying Galaxy S7 by the millions.

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cosarara97
I expected the article to say what made the phones catch fire.

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orionblastar
Defective battery according to CNet: [https://www.cnet.com/news/why-is-
samsung-galaxy-note-7-explo...](https://www.cnet.com/news/why-is-samsung-
galaxy-note-7-exploding-overheating/)

Even replacement phones caught fire, they blamed the batteries.

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sergers
Even this article is inconclusive... There has been no definitive cause.

My initial presumption was shoddy batteries+ quick charge 3.0 extra fast
charging + hot Qualcomm 820 just to add.

It was first Samsung phone to use quick charge 3.0. If there was a battery
defect, rapid charging didn't help.

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lj3
This is what I'm wondering. Did they fail to adequately test the quick charge
feature or do they have a supply chain issue? The Nokia phone explosions were
caused by Nokia accidentally buying counterfeit batteries because they sold
more units that they had anticipated. A startup I worked for back then was
created to solve that particular problem (Verical).

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polotics
what a click-bait title! tl;dr: Recalling early based on the assumption that
the fault was with one of the batteries' suppliers. Nothing about the root
cause issue in this article.

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totalZero
They don't know the root cause.

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mintplant
Which is what made me interested in reading the article--from the headline I
thought it had finally been found.

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totalZero
I'm curious too, and I'm probably going to stay interested until they finally
conclude something. Hundreds of thousands of handsets returned, billions of
dollars lost, and nobody knows why.

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1024core
According to the article, the mistake was admitting there was a problem and
recalling the phones.

If that's what Wall Street calls a "mistake", then I don't know what they'd
call the engineering problem(s) that caused the fires in the first place.

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mcphage
According to the article, the mistake was saying it was the batteries and then
doing a recall to replace the batteries, even though they weren't actually
sure that's what the issue was. When it turned out they were wrong, and the
replacement phones were catching fire as well, it made Samsung look a lot
worse and led to them killing the product entirely.

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sharpercoder
Obviously, the battery is the fire energy source since it is the only part
housing a massive energy.

Is it be possible the software (e.g. the battery management firmware) causes
this? A bug is never far away, nor is an intended malfunction (hack).

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wizzerking
To get around the Subscribe block just copy the title, use google.com and put
the title in quotes. The reference from Google.com will get around the
subscription wall if your IP has not viewed too many articles that month

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molecule
Or just use the 'web' link under the title.

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estacado
There's no "right move" in this situation. If they delayed the recall and it
was proved the battery was the culprit, then then there will be reports that
the company knew it was the battery weeks earlier and didn't do anything about
it. They had a tough choice to make, and they took the option that puts the
consumers' well-being first, and that is the right choice in my opinion. It
might be the right choice financially, but not everything is about money.

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ricardobeat
Following the 'web' link doesn't seem to get me through the paywall anymore.
How am I supposed to read this article?

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gaur
Don't bother. The article doesn't actually deliver what the headline promises.

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senectus1
I had the first note 7, LOVED it to bits.. then sent it back for a
replacement, got a S7 Edge loaner.. hated it. Got the Note 7 replacement, Was
back in heaven.

Sent the Note 7 back, and have now got a Note 5 64GB. I like it and will keep
using it... but I still miss the Note 7. Am eagerly awaiting the Note 8 or
whatever is coming next from Samsung.

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walter_bishop
My understanding is that the problem is trying to speed up the charging cycle
and the battery not being able to dump the excessive temperature. For normal
use I assume the phone is able to cope.

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mannykannot
I imagine that if the managers had delayed the recall and the problem turned
out to be as they originally suspected, that would have been their fatal
mistake.

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arjie
The article suggests that the other option wasn't "delay the recall" but "kill
the phone". The fact that "kill the phone" came after "send supposedly safe
replacements" is what was fatal, not the early recall.

i.e. they thought they had enough evidence to damn one battery manufacturer,
but the truth was the problem was elsewhere, and they still don't know. Faced
with continuing problems and no known cause, if they'd pre-emptively pulled
the phone, the hope is that they'd be seen as looking out for their customers.

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walter_bishop
'Dendrites and Pits: Untangling the Complex Behavior of Lithium Metal Anodes
through Operando Video Microscopy'

[http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/acscentsci.6b00260](http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/acscentsci.6b00260)

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arjie
Anything specific you'd like to highlight?

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walter_bishop
I'm not knowledgeable enough to say, but there are problems with these kind of
batteries overheating, especially on recharging. Pumping electricity through a
material produces heat. If it has nowhere to go then you end up with a fire
and toxic fumes. The solution on airplanes being to put the battery in a
sealed metal box with a pipe to vent any toxic fumes to the outside of the
hull.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_787_Dreamliner_battery_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_787_Dreamliner_battery_problems)

