
US carriers halt Samsung Note 7 sales and replacements - colinprince
http://www.bbc.com/news/business-37604083
======
maxpert
I don't know how fatal this will be for Samsung next time they go out and sell
phones; but people have got a taste of buying from a company that doesn't have
any sales or customer rep centers easily accessible where people can go and
complaint. I really hope it doesn't turn out to be fatal for them but I also
hope it breaks the Samsung monopoly over Android and let brands like LG, HTC
shine.

~~~
sho_hn
LG has a top competitor out right now in the V20. Removable battery, MIL-spec
drop proof, second wide angle rear camera, concert-capable stereo mics with
manual controls, a second screen that's actually useful (it's located in what
would otherwise be dead bezel next to the front camera, and shows e.g.
notifications while fullscreen, or can be used as a taskbar), usable software
(read: close to vanilla Android Nougat now), fancy DAC and bundled with $150
B&O in-ears. With an aluminum main body and svelte looks.

And for some reason they won't launch it in Europe and steal Samsung's sales.
Madness, it's by far the most compelling phone available right now.

Happy with the one I got in Korea ...

~~~
Veratyr
It all sounds good but it has a 5.7" screen, which kills it for me. It must be
super hard to build a good, small phone or something.

~~~
sho_hn
This is partially down to the culture they come from. Koreans spend tons of
time commuting on subways or sitting in coffeeshops, often watching video
during both. The big screens are just a trade-of geared towards those use
cases.

------
CookieMon
Why did Note 7's have this problem?

I assume the fault is entirely in the battery (?), so did Samsung change how
the batteries were manufactured this year? Does the Note 7 have power demands
that mean they can't go back to tried and tested battery manufacture?

(Hoping there are EE's or manufacturing people here that might have some
educated guesses)

~~~
Steko
This is the best writeup I've seen of how this happened:

[https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-09-18/samsung-c...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-09-18/samsung-
crisis-began-in-rush-to-capitalize-on-uninspiring-iphone)

tldr plus my speculation:

* Leaked iPhone 7 specs made Samsung shoot for the moon with Note 7 design

* Specs designed in boardroom called for Note 7 be lighter, shorter and narrower than iPhone 7+ but also have a larger screen, a significantly larger battery and a lot of internal room taken up by the stylus (and sure insert headphone jack punchline here).

* This is a hard problem, otherwise you'd think Apple would ship a 20% larger battery too.

* Design on all the massive revisions started late and launch was moved up so design timeframe was enormously compressed

* Engineers at Samsung don't have standing to tell execs something can't be done.

* And so mistakes were made somewhere between not having enough time to do it right and being asked to do the improbable.

~~~
pawadu
> * Specs designed in boardroom called for Note 7 be lighter, shorter and
> narrower than iPhone 7+ but also have a larger screen, a significantly
> larger battery ...

The Note series has always had a better display to size ratio and a larger
battery. I don't see why this particular iteration should all the sudden have
problems with that.

For reference:

    
    
        Galaxy Note 5
        153.2 x 76.1 x 7.6 mm (6.03 x 3.00 x 0.30 in)
        Weight	171 g (6.03 oz)
        Display 5.7 inches (~75.9% screen-to-body ratio)
        Battery Non-removable Li-Po 3000 mAh battery
    
        iphone 6s+
        Dimensions	158.2 x 77.9 x 7.3 mm (6.23 x 3.07 x 0.29 in)
        Weight	192 g (6.77 oz)
        Display 5.5 inches (~67.7% screen-to-body ratio)
        Battery Non-removable Li-Ion 2750 mAh battery (10.45 Wh)

~~~
Steko
> I don't see why this particular iteration should all the sudden have
> problems with that.

Well there's larger and there's a lot larger. This particular iteration
increased the gap substantially.

3500 mAh (GN7) >> 3000 mAH (GN5) ~ 2950 mAH (i7+) > 2750 mAH (i6S+)

Below article offers speculation either way: that both the design itself and
push for larger batteries was at fault and/or that it is simply a
manufacturing error although they seem like two sides of the same coin -- at
the end of the day you can't get around the fact that more batteries simply
take up more internal space and the larger that 'more' is the harder the
engineering problem is. Giving the engineers a hard design problem and then
not giving them the corresponding necessary time to develop and test their
designs is ultimately what's responsible for the defect.

[http://phys.org/news/2016-09-galaxy-recall-stronger-
batterie...](http://phys.org/news/2016-09-galaxy-recall-stronger-
batteries.html)

 _South Korean experts suggested Samsung may have been so ambitious with the
Note 7 's design that it compromised safety.

"There was no choice but to make the separator (between positive and negative
anodes) thin because of the battery capacity," said Lee Sang-yong, a professor
at Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology who worked more than a
decade at LG Chem, a leading lithium battery maker. Thicker separators can
improve safety but will not necessarily prevent all overheating issues, he
said.

Doh Chil-Hoon, head of the state-run Korea Electrotechnology Research
Institute's battery research division, said that based on the limited
information provided by Samsung, he believes the push to increase battery
power was part of the problem.

"Even with a small manufacturing mistake, if there had been enough elements to
ensure safety, it would not explode," Doh said. "It is a roundabout way of
admitting weak safety."

...

[Wayne Lam, an industry analyst at IHS Markit Technology] said he thinks the
Note 7 battery problem resulted from weak controls in manufacturing, not a
poor or unsafe design.

A spokeswoman at iFixit, which publishes repair guides for electronic gadgets,
offered a similar view. "We don't think any internal design changes in the
Note 7 are responsible for the exploding batteries—more likely just a
manufacturing defect," IFixit's Kay-Kay Clapp said in an email.

Apple has tweaked hardware and software it developed itself to make iPhones
use power more efficiently, while Samsung has increased the capacity of the
batteries in its phones.

That can be done without increasing size by adjusting components or changing
the production process, Lam said.

"You have two different trajectories, with Samsung packing in more energy
density, versus Apple trying to trim it down by optimizing everything else,"
he said, adding that the two rivals are "constantly locked in this arms race
of improving and one-upping."_

Note though that those comments come before the replacements started
exploding, something that implicates a deeper design flaw than just the
battery production.

~~~
2muchcoffeeman
If you look at the ifixit tear down, the Samsung GN 7 battery also looks
smaller than the iPhone 7 Plus battery. I can't imagine having a higher energy
density is doing Samsung any favors.

Could this be why Apple pushes so hard on the SoC front? It's technically
easier to increase performance and reduce power consumption of your SoC than
it is to improve the battery capacity safely?

~~~
Steko
> GN 7 battery also looks smaller than the iPhone 7 Plus battery

Could be, it definitely looks smaller in two dimensions. But it also looks
thicker -- the i7 teardown doesn't show the thickness as clearly but it
doesn't appear to have anything like the 'pouch' you can see on the GN 7
battery.

GN 7 battery:

[https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/Samsung+Galaxy+Note7+Teardow...](https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/Samsung+Galaxy+Note7+Teardown/66389#s135829)

iPhone 7+ battery:

[https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/iPhone+7+Plus+Teardown/67384...](https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/iPhone+7+Plus+Teardown/67384#s136474)

------
CountSessine
I doubt Samsung will try to find another sales channel for them in North
America. Going back to the feature-phone era, one of their most important
advantages over their handset competitors has been their loyalty to the big
phone companies. Doing an end-run around them to sell directly to their
customers seems...unseemly.

So what happens to all of these Note 7's? Do they just get buried in a ditch
somewhere? From reading Android Central and other sites, it seems like there
are still a lot of Samsung faithful who are ready to risk having their heads
blown off to own one.

~~~
userbinator
_Samsung said in a statement last month that the issue of overheating was
caused by a "rare" manufacturing error that resulted in the battery's "anode-
to-cathode [negative and positive electrodes]" coming into contact._

Looks like the fault is in the batteries, internal shorts are both uncommon
and also extremely dangerous since they will essentially dissipate all the
energy in the cell as heat and can't be stopped externally.

This is partially why I'm wary of devices with batteries which aren't easily
removable... and to think a few years ago Samsung was making ads poking fun at
Apple users for not having removable batteries.

~~~
CamperBob2
_This is partially why I 'm wary of devices with batteries which aren't easily
removable..._

This argument is made all the time, but I don't understand it. If the
batteries were removable, a large number of owners would eventually replace
them with low-quality Chinese lithium batteries whose brand names contain the
word "Fire" somewhere.

The result will be, big surprise, more fires. The difference is that there
won't be one central manufacturer who can be forced to take responsibility for
them. Publicity, if any, will be too obscure for most users to notice.

There is no way on Earth you will end up with fewer battery fires if the
batteries are replaceable. We just won't hear about them.

~~~
Crespyl
At least in replacing the battery, the user is (theoretically) making an
informed decision/calculated risk that is in their own hands.

I suspect it's also a lot cheaper to recall/replace a handful of batteries
than to recall/replace _every single phone_.

------
dotancohen
What phones are an alternative to the Note? I use my Note 3's stylus dozens of
times a day. No other stylus comes close, as it uses Wacom technology as
opposed to standard stylus' capacitance sensing. The Wacom technology needs
the phone to support it.

Are there any good stylii for writing text (i.e. dragging across the screen)
for generic capacitance screens? All stylii that I've seen are good for
selecting things (i.e. pushing against the screen) but terrible for writing.

~~~
thrownblown
The first generation Nvidia shield had a great stylus.

------
kayoone
Screwing up once happens, even if it shouldn't. Doing it twice will seriously
shatter peoples trust in these devices and make them think twice before
purchasing a new Samsung phone again. Samsung is a behemoth but this can
really hurt their smartphone division.

~~~
eksemplar
After 2 years my S2 became a slow unfunctional piece of dead tech. I tried
resetting it through the Samsung tools, which didn't help, so I rooted it and
tried different versions of basic android on it, which didn't help. At the
same time I had two friends who were experiencing the same kinds of problems,
who let me toy with their phones.

It's completely anecdotal but three similar model phones breaking in exactly
the same manner at exactly the same period in their lives was enough to put me
off Samsung for good.

It's been some years since and I've seen Samsung in one scandal after another.
Like the time they had an entire range of flatscreen tvs break because they
put the transistors too close to the cooling plates, fixing it by moving the
transistors but replacing the $0.5 piece with a Samsung produced transistor
which they've never sold, making repairs nearly impossible.

~~~
TeMPOraL
To match an anecdote with an anecdote - I've been using S4 for 3 years, and
then gave it to my brother (I've upgraded to S7 with contract renewal), who's
been using it for the past year too. The phone is still going strong. Feels
slow-ish today, true, but still better than some of the cheaper Android phones
OOTB.

I blame Android's continued bloat creep[0] for that slowdown though. My
brother had S3 before, and so does my SO, and they were all becoming less and
less usable with time and each system update...

\--

[0] - Is there an official term for the phenomenon that software bloats
expands to cancel out any improvements in hardware?

~~~
isp
Wirth's law:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirth%27s_law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirth%27s_law)

------
sengork
Looks like they've halted production as well:
[http://ausdroid.net/2016/10/10/psa-samsung-halted-
note-7-pro...](http://ausdroid.net/2016/10/10/psa-samsung-halted-
note-7-production-power-phone-off-return/)

I am guessing that the culprit here is Samsung's shift to directly compete
with iPhone 7. All other Note releases were standalone and received very
little announcements.

------
piyush_soni
It's a sad end to what was a great phone otherwise.

~~~
camillomiller
That's a big otherwise... it's not a great phone at all, if it's so badly
engineered that it can catch fire...

~~~
piyush_soni
May be it's just the external battery supplier's issue, we're yet to find out.
I'm talking features/performance/Software/UI wise it's a great phone. Yes, the
battery department totally let it down.

------
fumar
I have Note 7, my first non-nexus device going back to the G1, and its a
brilliant piece of technology. The screen is flawless, its blazing fast, and
the stylus is great for notes on OneNote. I am pretty bummed out Samsung
couldn't get their manufacturers to deliver on 100% quality and control. I
can't think of what other device to get. The Pixel XL looks fine, but it lacks
wireless charging, a 5.7" screen, and a stylus.

For the record, Touchwiz is a bit too much, so I changed my launcher and made
a few changes to the UI to align more with stock android. But other than that,
I couldn't be happier with the ticking time bomb of a phone.

~~~
victorhooi
I was initially annoyed by the removal of wireless charging from the Nexus 5X
(I previously had a Nexus 5).

However, to be honest, wireless charging was always 1. flakey (placement had
to be _just_ right - often I'd check in the morning and it hadn't charged) and
2. super slow.

I'd much rather trade it off for super-fast charging (Pixel is meant to do 7
hours of battery life in 15 minutes), and the reversible (and standardised!)
USB-C cable.

I've always preferred smaller phones, so the 5" and 5.5" screens are fine for
me (although I'm obviously going for the standard Pixel at 5") - and stylus to
me doesn't make sense on a smaller phone screen anyhow - I have a tablet for
that.

Agree with you that Touchwiz is too much - I've always hated it and found it
gimmicky and tacky - and it tends to bog down the phone over time, like a bad
Windows install.

------
manojlds
As someone outside the US, I first associated "US carriers" with US Aircraft
Carriers. I thought this was about the navy banning Note 7 aboard the
carriers, before sales and replacement brought me back to thinking this is
about mobile carriers. In India we just call them mobile networks :)

NLP and AI is tough, no wonder.

~~~
kriro
That was my initial association as well. I actually thought there was some
sort of sea blockade to not let note 7s into the country. Then I thought that
would be a bit too ridiculous and only then did my brain recognize the other
meaning of carrier.

~~~
TeMPOraL
I immediately recognized the other meaning of the word, but I did let my
imagination fly for a bit, picturing 2+ carrier groups blockading shipments of
Note 7 phones...

------
nkobeissi
I want to understand how this story makes sense, and I can't. If you put the
facts together, they don't add up. First, here's the chronology.

1\. Original Note 7 phones were blowing up, Samsung issued a recall.

2\. Samsung released (suspiciously quickly) a new phone that used new
batteries made by Amperex, which also provides batteries for the iPhone line.
[A]

3\. A report comes in of a post-recall, "safe" phone blowing up while not
being connected to a charger and being turned off to be put in the owner's
pocket. [B]

4\. Another report of a "safe" phone blowing up while in the back pocket of
its owner. [C]

5\. Two more reports come in, both of a Note 7 blowing up overnight while
their owners were asleep. [D,E]

Second, here's what I don't understand:

* We know the batteries are likely safe since they come from a reputed manufacturer also providing iPhones their batteries. Heck, even the initial battery manufacturer was Samsung itself, and Li-Ion batteries aren't exactly a new and unstudied technology.

* Even after the new batteries were put in use, the phones are still exploding _even when not connected to a charger_ , as explicitly stated by reports [D] and [C], and as is likely the case for [B] and [E].

How are these phones blowing up when, in all likelihood, the batteries are
safe and have been replaced, and the phone isn't even under heavy use at the
time of the explosion? Maybe you could blame CPU heating or a faulty charging
mechanism, but the phones were not charging or under heavy load. All they were
doing was discharging at an idle rate. This is literally the state _least_
likely to cause this kind of explosion.

Can anyone explain what I'm missing?

Sources:

[A] [https://www.cnet.com/news/samsung-galaxy-note-7-explosion-
ba...](https://www.cnet.com/news/samsung-galaxy-note-7-explosion-battery-
manufacturing-error/)

[B] [http://www.theverge.com/2016/10/5/13175000/samsung-galaxy-
no...](http://www.theverge.com/2016/10/5/13175000/samsung-galaxy-note-7-fire-
replacement-plane-battery-southwest)

[C]
[http://focustaiwan.tw/news/asoc/201610080009.aspx](http://focustaiwan.tw/news/asoc/201610080009.aspx)

[D] [http://www.theverge.com/2016/10/9/13215728/samsung-galaxy-
no...](http://www.theverge.com/2016/10/9/13215728/samsung-galaxy-note-7-third-
fire-smoke-inhalation)

[E] [http://www.theverge.com/2016/10/9/13218730/samsung-galaxy-
no...](http://www.theverge.com/2016/10/9/13218730/samsung-galaxy-note-7-fire-
replacement-fourth-virginia)

~~~
bengale
From the articles I've seen it seems to be related to a slightly too small
area for the battery, and causing it to sort of pinch.

------
liw
It still seems to be OK to bring Note 7s on airplanes. Not bottles of water,
though, that's too dangerous.

~~~
JauntyHatAngle
You can bring bottles of water onto airplanes...

~~~
nazgob
Only if you buy is after security. Maybe we're gonna have to buy phones now
too :)

------
mrmondo
This adds to Samsung's long covered up history of phones that kill SDcards,
bloated batteries, uncompliant USB spec connections, under-specced voltage
regulators throughout, cheap USB chargers suspected as built to fail, screen
colour imperfections and second hand parts discovered in new phones discovered
during new phone tear downs. They regularly spend so much more money on
advertising on bus stops and trains than they ever have on r&d for any
product. The parts they sell to other vendors for rebranding etc... are almost
always custom, higher grade built to order parts, for example their nvme pcie
drives sold to Apple are built to much higher standards and they run
completely custom Apple firmware, and guess what? They don't fail or fire.

Samsung are a straight out dodgy company - they're the Microsoft of hardware
but with better advertising, unfortunately targeted towards people of slightly
lower social status often.

~~~
breakingcups
[citation needed]

~~~
mrmondo
I know what you're saying, but I often comment on public transport and you're
quite welcome to do your own research and dispute what I said.

------
vamur
So far there isn't any hard evidence (e.g HD videos) that the replacement
phones really have the issue. All claims are based on hearsay and "reports".

But if true then Samsung really needs changes to its management and product
line. It makes too many phones - right now there they have A, C, J, E lines
besides the Galaxy line, confusing and aggravating customers and likely
employees as well.

It can also mean that manufacturers are hitting a safety wall with lithium
batteries, which is bad news for future phone battery capacities.

~~~
joshstrange
Are you kidding? "hard evidence (e.g HD videos)"

At least 2 of these have happened while people have been sleeping (One guy in
KY had to be hospitalized to to inhalation of the smoke) and even if it
happened during the day most people have 1 camera/video camera with them and
it's their phone. Most people don't carry around a second camera to be used
only to film their supposedly safe replacement bursting into flames. It sounds
like the only way you'd believe this to be true is if you saw video of a phone
from production, to signing off by the president of Samsung that it was safe,
to shipping, to full use of the phone until such a time that it burst into
flames. People with phones that have caught fire have provided proof that the
serial numbers of their phones were supposed to be replacements and thus safe.

~~~
vamur
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. And video evidence these
days when billions have a smartphone shouldn't be much to ask for.

>>At least 2 of these have happened while people have been sleeping (One guy
in KY had to be hospitalized to to inhalation of the smoke) and even if it
happened during the day most people have 1 camera/video camera with them and
it's their phone.

And how do you know these people weren't violating manufacturer safety
guidelines? Or that the reports are true and not rumors? Or that it is not an
isolated accident?

>>Most people don't carry around a second camera to be used only to film their
supposedly safe replacement bursting into flames.

These days if something extraordinary happens - such as a phone blowing up in
the middle of the day - it is usually filmed. When it is not, then that raises
questions.

>> It sounds like the only way you'd believe this to be true is if you saw
video of a phone from production, to signing off by the president of Samsung
that it was safe, to shipping, to full use of the phone until such a time that
it burst into flames.

Chinese suppliers on Aliexpress today require unpacking videos before claiming
defective merchandise. So it isn't much to ask for some evidence before a
witch-hunt.

~~~
sparky_z
"These days if something extraordinary happens - such as a phone blowing up in
the middle of the day - it is usually filmed."

Are you sure there's no selection bias going on here? In today's
media/internet climate, I think your vastly more likely to hear about
extraordinary events that have been filmed than those that haven't.

