The mainstream media news cycle has moved on to other inflammatory matters recently (like: U.S. President-elect Donald Trump and his controversial cabinet picks), but within the smartphone industry, people are still wondering, "just what the hell went wrong with the Galaxy Note 7?"
After all, companies much smaller than Samsung have pumped out dozens and dozens of phones in the past few years without such incidents. How can industry giant Samsung still have no idea as to what led to the failure of its recent flagship?
Well, according to a respected independent team of hardware engineers who cracked open a Note 7 for a test recently, they've concluded that the phone's tendency to combust is due to a "fundamental problem with the design of the phone," and that Samsung sort of knew the "super aggressive" design was risky, but went with it anyway because it was trying so hard to innovate and gain a competitive edge.
In short, the phone's internals were so crammed in, the battery was continually being compressed. The pressure makes the "separator" of the positive and negative electrodes easily damaged. As you've probably read dozens of times already during the peak of the Note 7 incidents, when a battery's positive and negative bits come into contact, it generates heat continually to cause a thermal runway (aka fires).
A photo by Instrumental of the Note 7's internals highlights just how tight the battery was crammed... [+]
The U.S.'s CPSC (Consumer Product Safety Commission) actually came to the same conclusion a few months ago, when its spokesperson told Bloomberg that the Note 7's body was "too large for the compartment of the phone." The Wall Street Journal, citing sources inside the South Korean corporation, reported that Samsung, in an effort to beat the iPhone 7 to the market, rushed the production of the Note 7 and aggressively pushed for more of everything: power, features, innovation.
All of those reports surely fit into what Instrumental's team found with the Note 7. The researchers at Instrumental also believe Samsung engineers knew the battery would be a bit too tight and "took a deliberate step towards danger," hoping they can do enough to minimize the risk.
But even if the phones didn't catch fire all throughout September and October, the guys at Instrumental believe the flawed Note 7 design would have eventually led to massive swelling anyway.
Though I had more problems with the Note 7 than most reviewers and wrote several pieces calling it overrated, I was blown away by the fact Samsung managed to make a 5.7-inch device that was that small (to put things into perspective: Xiaomi's Mi Note 2 has almost virtually the exact design, down to the same screen sizes and curves, but it still comes out quite a bit wider and taller than the Note 7).
Now I know that design was a bit too good to be true. Samsung, in an effort to innovate, pushed too hard and built a phone that it knew could malfunction. To be honest, I ultimately respect the Samsung team for pushing the boundaries. They took a gamble, but it's cost them dearly: the company lost a reported 5.3 billion, and lost its spot as most profitable Android maker to Huawei this recent quarter.
