Gadgetory

the ongoing saga of the galaxy note 7 and it's exploding battery might finally be coming to a close Samsung reported that their investigation into the problems plaguing the note 7 was concluded several weeks ago and on January 23rd we should get the full press release on their findings over the last week we've gotten a number of reports where we feel we can put together a pretty decent hypothesis on what Samsung is likely to announce on Monday first of all this doesn't seem to be a manufacturing issue insofar as there weren't problems with specific batches of phones during the first wave of recalls there was a lot of finger-pointing at Samsung SDI that maybe this was just a bad batch of batteries but this doesn't seem to be the issue at play instead what we're looking at overall is a company trying to cram too much stuff into two smaller space pointing to the larger screen and a smaller overall form factor the inclusion of the s-pen and a pretty energy intensive iris scanner all contributing to reducing the amount of space inside the device for what would have been battery flexibility we're also able to glean that the fault tolerances for that battery were too low for a mass-produced consumer facing device below this video we've linked to an article from AE and hub they're a research firm in Singapore who conducted a test on older phones with removable batteries against newer phones which had batteries that were sealed into the phone body now what they found is that when phones have removable batteries that battery is clad in just a little bit of extra plastic guarding the cells and all of the energy density material inside this little mini form factor when the battery can be removed from the phone it only makes sense that you'd want a little extra armor plating around this battery it might end up in someone's back pocket and they might accidentally sit on it but when the battery is sealed inside the phone there's usually less of that armor instead you just get a flimsy pouch where all of those chemicals are gonna live and that comes with the benefit of delivering a higher energy density in the same form factor but that also means if that cell gets ruptured you have a higher energy density for the corresponding explosion as those chemicals at the air with space at such a premium inside the note 7 there just wasn't enough room for components to expand when they ran high and the phone ultimately had a harder time venting or properly releasing that heat in a safe fashion edition we're also reading some reports from investigators where the software designed to manage the thermals on the note 7 wasn't properly identifying or addressing runaway heat events if that last point proves to be accurate then we have a pretty dangerous double whammy phone hardware which has a difficult time releasing that heat and phone software which doesn't properly rain in the components on the phone responsible for that heat we are approaching our own conclusions here with just a little pinch of salt why I'm trying to use words like hypothesis as we will be getting Samsung's full analysis their full report on the 23rd and will finally be able to put this whole fiasco behind us and focus more of our energy and attention on all of the exciting new phones due out this year as always thanks so much for watching be sure to subscribe to this channel for more videos like these and help us out with some sharing on your favorite social networks for PocketNow i'm juan carlos back now some gadget guy on Twitter and Instagram and I will catch you all on the next video now normally I put some kind of funny little joke or gag after the title card on these videos but I wanted to take a second to personally reach out to the people in our community people watching videos like these who are still trying to hold on to their note sevens I can completely understand and appreciate the frustration of folks dealing with having to part with a phone which was going to be the best phone of 2016 but in light of the information that we've been able to dig up on this issue it really does start to look more and more like this wasn't a situation of a bad batch of manufacturing instead a systemic design flaw compounded by insufficient software safety to that end if our analysis is accurate this becomes less a situation of if a phone will explode but when a phone will explode if that turns out to be the case I think it's time to call it time to pack it in and start examining what kind of replacements you would be interested in using as your daily driver smartphone it's a terrible frustrating situation but no piece of consumer electronics no gadget like this is really worth the increased risk to your personal health or safety if you're still rockin a note 7 I hope you can find something you like almost as much and I wish you all the best of luck