Blame it on the batteries: Samsung says battery faults caused Galaxy Note 7 fires
After some intense investigation, Samsung has announced the reason behind its exploding Galaxy Note 7 phones.
It was lithium-ion batteries that caused the problems, causing the mobiles to overheat and catch fire – leading to the global recall of millions of devices and scrapping production of the model altogether. The incident was a costly one, wiping billions off the firm's operating profit.
At a press conference today, Samsung officials said faulty batteries were the problem, rather than issues with the device's hardware and software, and that there would be no repeat of these fires in future devices, such as the upcoming S8.
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In a statement, the company said: "We are taking responsibility for our failure to ultimately identify and verify the issues arising out of battery design and manufacturing."
Samsung said it had taken "several corrective actions" to make sure it never happens again.
The company said internal and independent investigations "concluded that batteries were found to be the cause of the Note 7 incidents". Overheating was caused by separate problems with batteries sourced from two different suppliers. In the first battery, the casing was too small making it short-circuit and alight, but was then replaced by a battery with a different manufacturing defect that led to the same result.
The smartphone maker has sought to reassure customers over uncertainty caused by the recall of more than 2.5m Note 7s last year, and said the lessons of the past several months "are now deeply reflected in our processes and in our culture".
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Its upcoming Galaxy S8 will have a Siri-like personal assistant; the first Samsung phone to have the feature.
“It will be significantly differentiated from the current services we see in the market now,” said Samsung Mobile chief technology officer and head of research and design Injong Rhee.
"Developers can attach and upload services to our agent. Even if Samsung doesn't do anything on its own, the more services that get attached the smarter this agent will get, learn more new services and provide them to end-users with ease."