Published in Mobiles

The Galaxy Note was a flawed design

by on06 December 2016


Putting 50 pounds of mud in a five-pound bag


It seems that the Galaxy Note caught fire because it had the same problem as Dolly Parton at an award’s ceremony. If you stick 50 pounds of mud in a five-pound bag you are going to get a flaming wardrobe malfunction.

A group of hardware engineers working for Instrumental took apart one of the few Note 7s and discovered that the explosive nature of the phone was due to a "fundamental problem with the design”.

Samsung must have suspected this “super aggressive" design was a risk, but went ahead with it anyway as the company wanted an edge – so to speak.

What is bad about this whole story is that if Instrumental is right, they must have known when the first problems cropped up that it was not a faulty battery and that the recall was an exercise in futility.

Instrumental’s Anna Shedletsk said that if it was only a battery part problem it could have been salvaged by a re-spin of the battery. It did not make sense to cancel the product line and cede several quarters of revenue to competitors.

She said that Samsung had stuffed the battery in the casing so that it was so tightly packed that pressure from natural swelling and stress placed on the Note 7 body was damaging the battery’s separator layers that keep the positive and negative layers apart.

“That pressure could be enough to squeeze the thin polymer separator to a point where the positive and negative layers can touch, causing the battery to explode,” writes Shedletsky.

Battery swell requires there to be a ceiling above a battery, roughly equivalent to 10 percent of its size to allow expansion. From that equation, the Note 7 should have had a 0.5mm ceiling but it did not have any.

Samsung was trapped by the problem that it wanted to make a smartphone that was super thin and sleek while being incredibly powerful with a long battery life. It was all pretty dumb and probably the reason why the company is not saying why it handled the problem the way it did.

Last modified on 06 December 2016
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