I have here a Sony Xperia E1 and a Motorola Moto G (2nd gen)
The Xperia is also $59 and Sony is a more widely known brand so let's assume they're similar.
The Moto G was $179 new some years ago the Xperia is $59 today.
On paper, they're similar in terms of ram, cpu cores, flash, gpu, etc.
But in practice... there is an absolute world of difference, and we're not talking flagship phones vs cheap ones, we're talking one cheap phone vs a slightly less cheap phone, but still low-mid range.
The screen on the sony sucks by comparison, its all washed out and grey (not IPS), the speakers also suck, the camera sucks, the letters in the SONY logo are falling off it now says SO, the thing is a bastard to hold on to because the case is slippery. It's also just slower for some reason, even though the CPU is faster, so I assume the flash is crappy? And the digitizer sucks, scrolling goes wobbly all the time. (I thought, oh, I'll buy a cheap Sony, they make good stuff... I guess cheap shit is cheap shit no matter whose name is on it.)
and that's Sony, so I can only imagine Blu is worse.
(just FYI, flagships are better at everything in terms of speed, display quality, camera, feeling, etc, but they also do A LOT MORE physically, i.e. they have NFC, they're waterproof, they read fingerprints, they have multiple gyros, etc)
From the specs I can find, the R1 HD has a 5-inch 720p IPS display and much better reviews than the Sony Xperia E1 did. Not only that, at the time of its release the E1 was competing with the Moto E which (like its bigger brother) also had an IPS screen and far better reviews than the E1.
I am not saying that Samsung could not have made another mistake, but I think it is unreasonable to try and link every single battery issue and explosion under the Samsung brand as something that is a precursor to another giant issue.
This recently happened with an iphone on a plane: http://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/apple-faa-investigatin...
I was also afraid of questioning if it was a Samsung Galaxy Note 7 because the attendant made an announcement saying people should turn it off and she didn't. Next time I'm not going to be afraid. Can't imagine the consequence if it caught fire at 30,000 feet.
A burned hole in the carpet.
Fire inside the hold is another matter entirely, but there are fire suppression systems fitted into all planes nowadays.
I hope that this desaster forces either phone vendors or regulatory agencies to mandate replaceable batteries. The EU got through with mandating micro-USB, after all...
Watertightness can be achieved without sacrificing replaceable batteries.
Also, my Galaxy Note 1 battery blew up on me because I used a cheap charger. I simply took it out, disposed of it at a city waste center, and put in a new battery for 15€. Try this with a "closed" phone. Either you can do it yourself, which requires at minimum 3h time + specialized equipment (e.g. regulated hot air gun), or pay 100€+ to a service center.
Thanks but no thanks to fixed batteries.
LOL, you mean like follow the proper legal process for filing a recall in the US? Yeah... they did none of that. What exactly was "above and beyond"?? Seriously, I'm not even joking, I'm genuinely curious as from my perspective they did the absolute bare minimum, and took an insane amount of time to even start addressing such a dangerous defect.
I've worked with companies that had a dangerous defect they discovered before any issues occurred, and the same day they stopped sales, contacted every potentially affected customer directly and requested they stop using the product and sent them a shipping label to get the gear back and replace it at no cost or traveling to a store for the user.
If this is a poor company response please let me know who has done better as I would too like to do business with them instead. Clearly my experiences with companies have been drastically different than yours.
I disagree. Given that this phone model already had battery problems, it is not at all irrational to assume the new battery problems are related to (or the same as) the old ones. That's far likelier than the new problems happening by pure coincidence, given that the base rate of phones catching fire is so small. I think what you're forgetting here is that, by far the most likely scenario is that Samsung just didn't fix the original problem correctly.
On the other hand if they did not realize this, perhaps they do deserve all the bad press. Regardless nobody actually knows right now, and my opinion is that I believe this is all news hype bandwagon behavior right now.
[0]http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/2016/09/16/us-regulato...
http://www.nasdaq.com/article/why-and-how-to-invest-in-samsu...
> The shares of Samsung don’t trade on major exchanges like Nasdaq and NYSE in the U.S. It is listed on the Korean exchange and available as GDR in London and Luxembourg. However, in accordance with Rule 144A of the U.S. Securities Exchange Act, U.S. citizens are prohibited from investing in GDR’s. The following options are available to U.S. investors:
> 1. Investors can either buy shares directly in the Korean stock market after proper paper work or through a local securities firm or bank (Merrill Lynch, Pierce, Fenner & Smith Inc. are eligible)
> 2. Investors can buy Samsung’s shares traded over-the-counter in the U.S.
> 3. Investors can opt to take exposure to Samsung along with other Korean companies by investing in a South Korea ETF, for example, the iShares MSCI South Korea Capped ETF (EWY) has a heavy exposure of 20.64% towards Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd.
The few weeks using the Blu went a lot differently than I expected. The phone is very solid and the overall experience of using the phone is first-rate.
It would be one thing if we were talking about a $599 Android phone compared with a $749 iPhone. But this thing cost me $59 which is in a totally different ballpark. I would simply not have expected it to be anywhere close to iPhone quality but it is.
The only things that are "worse" than an iPhone 6 in my opinion are:
- the touch screen is slightly less accurate for taps, but this could also be because I'm less accustomed to Android.
- No compass. GPS works fine but panning the phone around doesn't re-orient the map when navigating which is a feature I like.
There are also several nice features which it has that the iPhones lack, such as support for SD card storage expansion (I immediately added a fast 64GB one I had lying around) and a second SIM card.
Not trying to nitpick features. Buying a R1-HD is like getting a one year old Ferrari for $12K.
Twenty minutes of work over four years is not a big deal.
The time for serious, adult action was several weeks ago. From here on out, they deserve what they get.
Which begs the question - given the hundreds of millions of smartphones with out there - how many, even without a manufacturing flaw, end up smoking/catching fire? 1 in a million? 1 in 10 million?
[0] http://bgr.com/2016/09/27/note-7-recall-china-samsung-fire-e...
Very curious if the fire was specifically caused by wireless charging.
http://batteryuniversity.com/learn/
http://batteryuniversity.com/learn/article/bu_304b_making_li...
Is it just unbalanced reporting or possibly sabotage? Seriously don't believe they got wrong what everyone else seems to have dodged.
This is the biggest FU to samsung.
At least I really hope it is. Twisting the knife at something like this would be a pretty horrible thing to do.
I don't always charge my iPhone 7 (shows headphone plugged into the lighting port), but when I do...I do it without bringing down commercial airliners.
Unless I see statistical evidence that replacement Note 7 is catching on fire (random, different circumstances), then I do not see a reason to believe Note 7 replacement is b0rked.
Unfortunately, most people do not reason like that. Samsung's reputation will suffer, even after this single "Replacement Note 7 on fire" incident.
This was even after they thought they fixed the issue, so of course it looks very bad. Not only did they build a dangerous consumer device, it seems they did not actually fix it the second time around.
maybe there is no acceptable reason but it happens A LOT:
It is an insanely hard engineering challenge. I have no problem believing that a malfunction rate in the 0.00000001% region is possible.
This is going to stick in people's minds – I overhead a couple of conversations where people were a bit confused about whether their phones were safe or not – they knew they had a Samsung, but many people don't differentiate between all the different models.
This is especially bad for Samsung, I think, because it doesn't just affect folks with a Note 7 -- everyone waiting at the gate hears the announcement. Talk about negative brand associations.
I imagine some break down is: I have an Android phone. I have a Samsung phone. I have a Samsung Galaxy. I have a Samsung Galaxy Note.
But Samsung Galaxy Note 7, specifically? I'm guessing at best 50% might know that.
I'm surprised this airline still doesn't have Planegard or something similar on board their aircraft. Burning/exploding devices are going to happen often enough that this should be a necessity.
In what has to be the nerdiest humor I've ever come up with, I suggested to some astronomer friends here at NASA that this Samsung Galaxy line be rebranded the Samsung Seifert.
Is it theoretically possible that malware could be designed that would cause a Lithium Ion powered smart phone's battery to catch fire? I'm thinking it would be more of a low-level firmware update where a programmable logic device was used as part of the battery protection circuit.
Thoughts?
"Keep them in your car," one of the signs said. Hmmm, maybe storing them near many liters of gasoline isn't the best idea . . .
There's a reason people charging quadcopter's lipo batteries are told to watch them while charging, not abandon them.
What is the actual problem described in technical terms, really?
Still, though, airlines would rather avoid the problem entirely. Airline safety usually relies on defense-in-depth - you fix the root cause, and then you fix anything else that would've stopped the problem, because things go wrong in a cramped cylinder at 30,000 feet. For example, a fast-moving fire could easily burn through the hydraulics or electronics that would trigger the fire suppression system before it has a chance to go off.
The fact this is a replacement means the product has a major engineering flaw, and is likely to end up meaning the product is scrapped completely.
This could be the end of Samsung. They need to get on this and shut it down within a few days. Good luck to them.
This really could not. Samsung is a gigantic conglomerate. They make everything from power plants to super tankers and weapon systems. They could lose their phone business entirely and still be huge.
Samsung will have to release a Note 8 soon. Note 7 users will have a hard time even in future and it's bad for Samsung's brands.
You're statement would also mean that if you're a department within Apple you also do not need to compete or try to survive. I don't think that's necessarily true. There are probably inefficiencies, but there is also a lot to gain as well. It just depends on the quality of the organization.
http://forums.macrumors.com/threads/iphone-7-randomly-overhe...
It's happened to other companies in the past. It's entirely plausible that Samsung just screwed up in the design or manufacturing stage, and there is zero evidence of the conspiracies you suggest.
"Let us not attribute to malice and cruelty what may be referred to less criminal motives. Do we not often afflict others undesignedly, and, from mere carelessness, neglect to relieve distress?" -Jane West
It's not hard to believe that Samsung has made mistakes, and maybe under the pressure to fix those mistakes has made yet more. It's unfortunate and probably speaks to some cultural issues at the top, but it hardly requires external forces.
And again, I've literally never met a person who couldn't immediately name their model smartphone, not the most dumbass poor person I've met nor my completely tech illiterate grandparents. Also, your breakdown seems fanciful anyway, who in the world would know that they have a Samsung "Galaxy"? No one cares about that name, it's only ever said in the middle of the whole title, it isn't a thing that people think about on its own.
I don't know, I just have a massive issue with you calling people who don't know their phones lazy/rich/ignorant. It's really not fair.
That said, it's relatively unlikely that these folks would have a brand new flagship phone so soon after release.
It's a flagship device released less than two months ago (Aug 19), notable for its stylus (that regular Galaxies don't have).
My friend works at a Samsung store and had people trying to return their Galaxy S4s.
I called ahead to have them reserve the S4, they actually double checked the price, scanned it, etc. As I was wondering whether to buy a Note 3 or an S4 I concluded shop/fate decided for me with a nice discount ;)
I came from a much smaller phone so size wise I didn't notice. Only when unboxing and seeing the stylus.
Initial conclusions indicate an error in production that
placed pressure on plates contained within battery cells.
That in turn brought negative and positive poles into
contact, triggering excessive heat. Samsung however
stressed that it needed to carry out a more thorough
analysis to determine “the exact cause” of battery damage.
I seem to recall an article not too long ago (perhaps here on HN?) that analyzed the Note 7 battery failures; their conclusion was along the lines that the phone was designed too slim for the battery manufacturing tolerance.
So in some percentage of the phones the battery will be under constant mechanical pressure because the battery is slightly bigger than the space allocated for it. This pressure may eventually force the plates inside the battery into contact with each other, or at least close enough to cause leak currents and overheating.
> Does turning them off prevent them from catching on fire?
Not necessarily. Assuming the cause is as Samsung describes it, it can happen even with the phone turned off. But overheating to the point of thermal runaway is more likely at higher voltages (during charging, or with fully charged battery), and probably more likely during high current drain (aka using the phone).
For more technical details, I suggest the Electrical Engineering Stackexchange.
Someone at Samsung is having a very bad day.
Nevertheless I would be freaking out if that happened mid flight.
Doubtful. Isn't it the Li-ion batteries that are combusting, ie. chemical reaction?
Whereas few overly worry about shipping 1000+/- rounds by ground, except e.g. the movers that just moved me to my new home, they really can't afford to play the game of numbers with the few trucks they have (no batteries, or liquids (which could make a schedule breaking mess), either).
Big enough high energy batteries on planes, or too close to my skin ... those give me the heebie jeebies....
https://www.faa.gov/about/initiatives/hazmat_safety/more_inf...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asiana_Airlines_Flight_991
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UPS_Airlines_Flight_6
for recent examples
https://www.productsafety.gov.au/recall/samsung-samsung-top-...
At best you've then got a >$10k invoice to refill and reset the system. More likely you've got damage to servers, people and/or the building as well as massive amounts of disruption to deal with.
They'll just sweep it under the rug and release the next one in 9 months.
I'm imagining cargo ships / stores with stacks of these things though. Wonder if one goes boom, would that spread and start a fire?
My RC aircraft group has a 55 gallon drum with salt water at our flying field. RC aircraft pretty much exclusively use lithium polymer packs, sometimes 2 the size of bricks in larger models / big helis. If a lipo starts smoking, you chuck it in the salt water and it shorts it out + cools it down. The reaction when they short internally (such as when they malfunction or get damaged e.g. When a heli crashes and smashes the pack -- they're not super rigid) is more thermite than dynamite, but it can still burn through things like flying tin can aircraft.
Here's what happens when you overcharge a few on purpose and beat them with a stick: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=coX0SwubG4A
Typically there's quite a bit of warning in the form of smoke first. Not sure if the chemistry in the Samsung batteries but they're likely lithium polymer. There are tons of different chemistries though: http://batteryuniversity.com/learn/article/types_of_lithium_...
Every airline mentioned this. American, Japan Airlines, Dragonair, Cathay Pacific, Etihad, JetBlue and Southwest.
"Green said that he had powered down the phone as requested by the flight crew and put it in his pocket when it began smoking."
What's the remedy here? All Galaxy Notes in the airtight metal box until we land?
All phones with a battery are a fire hazard if they get the wrong OS.
One of the airlines last week shorted the warning to "Samsung 7 phone".
Bad PR for Samsung.