14 DAY TRIAL // In the absence of an official statement from Samsung or investigators on the reasons why replacement Galaxy Note 7 smartphones caught fire, many theories are surfacing online. Analysts state that Samsung must determine the cause of the fires quickly if it wishes to minimize the impact of the Note 7 fiasco on the brand image.
A report by Financial Times shows that problems with the Note 7 might have arisen because of some tweaks the company made to the processor. Samsung wanted to speed up the rate at which the phone could be charged, and this might have caused the devices to overheat.
“If you try to charge the battery too quickly it can make it more volatile. If you push an engine too hard, it will explode. Something had to give. These devices are miracles of technology - how much we can get out of that tiny piece of lithium-ion,” said the source to the Financial Times. This indicates that the problem wasn’t caused by the battery after all.
A design flaw might have been to blame for the Note 7 situation
Sources have stated for the New York Times that Samsung doesn’t exactly know what caused the phones to catch fire. During the first recall, engineers at the company were unable to get a phone to explode, and because the deadline was so tight, they concluded that it must have been a battery problem. It seems that testers were unable to reproduce fires in replacement phones either.
Another theory seems to suggest that the symmetrical design of the Note 7 was the flaw that caused the phone to overheat. The batteries made by Samsung SDI were too large for the Note 7 causing abnormal pressure from the phone’s curved sides, according to Phone Arena.
The design in replacement units is unchanged, as Samsung and battery supplier ATL rushed to provide Note 7 owners with replacements. It’s difficult to say which theory is the closest to the truth, but it’s highly likely that a combination of several factors caused the demise of Samsung’s best smartphone yet.
Samsung will most likely issue statements after the CPSC and Korean officials present the results of their separate investigations.