Samsung Will Explain What Went Wrong With the Galaxy Note 7
Here's what we know so far.
Samsung will announce on Monday, January 23 exactly what went wrong with the Galaxy Note 7 and how it plans to move forward. In the fall of 2016, the phone was taken off the market after numerous reports of units catching on fire. After an initial recall of some units, many of the replacement devices failed, too. Since the U.S. government recalled the Note 7 in September and Samsung discontinued the phone in October, the public has not heard much more about it. But this Monday, Koh Dong-Jin, the head of Samsung’s smartphone business division, will publicly disclose the results of the company’s internal investigation into the Galaxy Note 7 debacle. Insider information obtained by the Wall Street Journal suggests that the announcement will reveal that the issue stemmed from the phones’ batteries.
“To regain confidence from consumers, we will clearly point out what caused the Galaxy Note 7 to catch fire and announce follow-up measures,” says a Samsung official about Monday’s announcement. This has been a difficult chapter in Samsung’s history. The electronics manufacturer has been Korea’s trusted brand for years, and the Galaxy has been one of the top smartphones on the market. The Galaxy Note 7’s discontinuation left a gap in Samsung’s lineup. Hopefully this new report will give the public some satisfactory answers.
Even though the announcement has not happened yet, Timothy W. Martin and John D. McKinnon of the Wall Street Journal say they already know the culprit in the Galaxy Note 7 issue: Some of the Samsung phones were manufactured with irregularly sized batteries. According to Martin and McKinnon, this caused overheating, which in turn caused the fires with which we’re now familiar. They say Monday’s announcement will also include details about other manufacturing issues that resulted in the second round of explosions in phones that replaced the original problem units.
In addition to details about what went wrong, Samsung is expected to outline what it’s going to do in the future to keep something like this from happening again.
