14 DAY TRIAL // Samsung has permanently stopped production and sales of the Galaxy Note 7, and it's now focusing on retrieving faulty units from owners. The South Korean company is looking to boost sales of its other smartphones, in order to cover some of the Note 7 missed sales.
Even though Samsung might be looking to put the whole Galaxy Note 7 debacle behind it, there are still questions regarding the reasons why those smartphones caught fire even though they were from the replacement batch.
The first recall was caused by a battery flaw that occurred during the manufacturing process. An error in production placed pressure on plates inside battery cells, determining the negative and positive poles to come in contact and thus generate excessive heat. The result was Note 7 smartphones starting to emit smoke and going up in flames while charging.
The peculiar thing about replacement units is that they didn’t need to be charging in order to overheat and thus have the same fate. It may seem that replacement Note 7 phones had a different battery problem compared to the original ones.
Replacement Note 7 units came with different battery flaw
During the first recall, the South Korean company replaced Samsung SDI as the battery supplier with Chinese company Amperex Technology. The latter company had made batteries for Note 7 units sold in China, a country which wasn’t part of the recall.
Another interesting piece of information is that Amperex Technologies is also the battery supplier for Apple’s iPhones, which didn’t exactly have the same fate.
A report by Bloomberg says that the issue with replacement Note 7 units is different compared to the one encountered in original units and that it might have occurred in the supply line, after Samsung began replacing Note 7 units. The batteries provided by Samsung SDI had been slightly too large for the Note 7, which is one of the reasons they overheated.
Samsung is gathering testing data on Note 7 from partners
Samsung didn’t provide any details as to why batteries in replaced units were faulty too. Apparently, the company has asked some of its partners to share testing data, but didn’t reciprocate with information of its own.
An investigation is currently underway in the US, as well as in South Korea. Last month, we reported that South Korean officials had asked Samsung and the battery supplier to conduct additional x-ray tests before shipping out the units.
The results of the investigation should shed some light on the matter and show if additional tests were performed by both the manufacturer and the battery supplier. Needless to say, the damage has already been done and Samsung’s reputation as a smartphone maker suffered a massive blow.