The Note 7 was supposed to be the ‘in thing’ (for many people, including me) at least before the explosions. We heard many reasons; some made sense; others did not. In fact, I met one aunty who said the device had exploded because she heard ‘evo-stik’ was used to seal the battery into the phone.
Made me want to ask dear Aunty Bisi if she was there when the phone was being assembled… lol… that never happened.
Anyways, the company, Samsung has been kind of quiet concerning what really went wrong, but on the 23rd of January 2017, the company held a press event in South Korea and released a video explaining what happened.
Apparently one of the unique selling points of the Note 7 was the 3500mAh battery which was built to get through a full day; turns out the same USP was the root of the problem. According to the video, the company carried out an investigation with more than 200,000 devices and 30,000 batteries. They found out the explosion problem was caused by two factors.
The first which had to do with the batteries from Samsung SDI; there wasn’t enough space between the pouch around the battery and its internals. And because the phone was so slim, stress was placed on the upper right corner of each battery that caused electrodes inside each battery to touch each other, leading to a short circuit, and then, the explosion.
For the second case of batteries from Amperex Technology Limited, some batteries had sharp protrusions inside the cell that led to damaging the separator between the anode and cathode, also leading to the short circuit.
Thankfully, Samsung has learnt some lessons and at the end of the press event, D. J. Koh, the president of Samsung Mobile stated, “We are taking responsibility for our failure to identify the issues arising out of the battery design and manufacturing process prior to the launch of the Note 7”.
Also according to the video, the company promised to make improvements through an 8-point battery check which includes a durability test, a charge and discharge test, an x-ray scan and some other tests.
Seems Samsung is trying to win our hearts back and I have to admit they are quite good at it. Can they win your confidence back?
