Samsung is said to have finally concluded its probe into the Galaxy Note 7 fires, and will be revealing the results a week from today. Quite unsurprisingly, the company has concluded that the culprit behind these fires was the battery.
Reuters cites a person familiar with the situation as saying that Samsung’s engineers were finally able to replicate the fires in their labs, and have concluded that the battery was the cause. Samsung is reportedly planning on revealing the results of its investigations on January 23, a day before it announces its fourth-quarter earnings. The report further claims that Samsung will also reveal what steps it is taking to avoid a repeat of such a situation.
Samsung is seeking to put behind it the Galaxy Note 7 explosions, one of the biggest product safety failures in tech history, as it prepares to launch the Galaxy S8, one of its flagship phones, sometime in the first half of this year.
"They've got to make sure they come clean and they've got to reassure buyers as to why this won't happen again," said Bryan Ma, Singapore-based analyst for researcher IDC.
It doesn’t really come as a huge surprise that the battery was to blame, especially since third-party investigations have also come to the same conclusion. One investigation blamed the explosions on the ‘aggressive battery design’. In essence, the Galaxy Note 7’s super-slim body meant that the big battery was continually being compressed. This resulted in the positive and negative layers to squeeze and eventually come in contact with each other. This led to the battery heating up and causing an explosion. This finding was in line with earlier claims by the US Consumer Product Safety Commission, which too concluded that the “phone’s battery was slightly too big for its compartment and the tight space pinched the battery, causing a short circuit.”
The Galaxy Note 7 has not only proven to be an embarrassing mistake for Samsung, but also a very costly one at that. The decision to recall its flagship phablets in October is expected to cost the company around 6.1 trillion Won ($5.2 billion approximately). What started off as one of the best smartphones built by Samsung, quickly turned out to be a nightmare the company has yet to wake up from.
Now all eyes are on how Samsung plans on getting back on course, and win back its customers and investors’ trust. One way of doing that is to launch a good flagship device this year, and one that doesn’t put users’ lives in danger. If all the rumors are to be believed, the upcoming Galaxy S8 is turning out to be an interesting device.
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