Samsung finally says why the Note 7 phone batteries were exploding

The Note 7 exploding battery fiasco was one of the most serious product challenges Samsung has ever experienced. At a time when the company was doing so well as one of the leading manufacturers of quality smartphones worldwide, this exploding battery saga created a marketing mess for the Korean tech giant and left the competitors to enjoy the advantage.To make it worse, Samsung didn’t even say something sensible to let us know why the Note 7 battery was exploding. That has just changed now as the company has finally revealed what was wrong with its popular phablet.Following a half-hearted apology, the company opened up their testing process and results to public scrutiny. It appears that Samsung has conducted elaborate tests with more than 200 thousand devices. These tests were focused on abnormalities related to water resistance, wireless charging, fast charging, software issues, the Iris scanner and USB Type C. From the initial runs, none of these tests pointed to possible issues. Then the company went ahead and examined the production process and invited help from third party investigators such as Exponent, UL, and TUV Rheinland AG.

Issues established

The comprehensive testing by Samsung and third parties discovered a number of issues affecting the versions of Note 7 that were recalled. The batteries appeared to have had a design pro on their top corners. This was suspected to have led to abnormities. The + and – electrodes are commonly separated by a distinctive protective layer. In the case this layer has damage, the electrodes can short circuit. This seems to have been the issue with some of the Note 7 versions.According to UL, one of the third party research firms that were involved, affected units showed similar abnormalities. UL confirmed that the cause of this issue was really the design flaw on the top corners of the batteries. A thin separator between eh positive and negative electrode also contributed to the problem.Samsung wrote a blog post on its website to announce this testing.  There was also a press conference focused on the same.So now the air is clear, and we can see that it really was a small design issue that led to massive problems for the company. Sammy gets a clean bill of healthy for now, but they’ve got to be more careful with issues like this if they wish to inspire durable loyalty in their consumers. Moving forward, the Korean manufacturer said it will implement more stringent preventive measures!

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