As an avid iPhone user who does want to see Apple succeed. I genuinely feel horrible for Samsung. You can say whatever you want about corporate management at any company but at the bottom of the pole are hard working engineers who put so much time and effort into their work. The team that built the iris scanner must have worked incredibly hard with cutting edge technology to make that work in time. So the whole team deserves a ton of credit for the device. I really hope they don't discontinue the line, I hope they just keep doing great work and I believe customers will give them a chance.

The tech industry is awesome because of the beautiful (and incessant) competition. But at the end of the day, I think we all feel for the challenges that come with this line of work. When a device bends, melts, explodes; a product leads customers astray or doesn't live up to hype; that's really unfortunate.

I expected the article to say what made the phones catch fire.

what a click-bait title! tl;dr: Recalling early based on the assumption that the fault was with one of the batteries' suppliers. Nothing about the root cause issue in this article.

According to the article, the mistake was admitting there was a problem and recalling the phones.

If that's what Wall Street calls a "mistake", then I don't know what they'd call the engineering problem(s) that caused the fires in the first place.

Obviously, the battery is the fire energy source since it is the only part housing a massive energy.

Is it be possible the software (e.g. the battery management firmware) causes this? A bug is never far away, nor is an intended malfunction (hack).

To get around the Subscribe block just copy the title, use google.com and put the title in quotes. The reference from Google.com will get around the subscription wall if your IP has not viewed too many articles that month

There's no "right move" in this situation. If they delayed the recall and it was proved the battery was the culprit, then then there will be reports that the company knew it was the battery weeks earlier and didn't do anything about it. They had a tough choice to make, and they took the option that puts the consumers' well-being first, and that is the right choice in my opinion. It might be the right choice financially, but not everything is about money.

Following the 'web' link doesn't seem to get me through the paywall anymore. How am I supposed to read this article?

I had the first note 7, LOVED it to bits.. then sent it back for a replacement, got a S7 Edge loaner.. hated it. Got the Note 7 replacement, Was back in heaven.

Sent the Note 7 back, and have now got a Note 5 64GB. I like it and will keep using it... but I still miss the Note 7. Am eagerly awaiting the Note 8 or whatever is coming next from Samsung.

My understanding is that the problem is trying to speed up the charging cycle and the battery not being able to dump the excessive temperature. For normal use I assume the phone is able to cope.

I imagine that if the managers had delayed the recall and the problem turned out to be as they originally suspected, that would have been their fatal mistake.