At the latter point of 2016, the Samsung Galaxy Note 7 was revealed and, at the time, experts were quick to call it the best smartphone of 2016, wiping the competition clean with its specs, beautiful screen and all of this with the inclusion of the Samsung engineered S-Pen.

However, it did not take too long for this hype behind the Note 7 to disappear, with many consumers finding that their new smartphones were catching fire spontaneously, almost as if there was a self-destruct button on the smartphone. The reason for this, at the time, was unknown. However Samsung being safe swapped the manufacturing process of the batteries in the Note 7 and everyone was happy.

Until they started catching on fire again.

With this, Samsung had to recall every Note 7, issue a huge apology to all consumers and, in total, lost billions because of this.

But, don’t worry (we think). Samsung have learnt their lesson and have finally delievered the reasons why the Note 7, both the first and second waves of the smartphones, were catching alight.

Note 7 Wave 1

The first wave of the phone was catching on fire because of the poor design of the battery. Due to Samsung trying to fit in such a large battery into a small area of the phone, the battery itself did not actually fit properly into the phone. This hardware misalighnment caused the top right of the battery to be squashed. From being squashed, electrode plates inside the battery in the top right started to bend towards eachother, until they touched. When these electrodes touch, an electrical surge in current travelled across the electrodes causing the phone to overheat and subsequently burst into flames.

Therefore, the smartphone had a poorly designed battery.

Note 7 Wave 2

After the failure of the first wave, Samsung issued out a second wave of Note 7s with a supposedly improved battery design to prevent the same issue from occuring again, for which it did. The battery was better fitted into the phone. However, the cause of the second wave self destructing was because of a separate and different unrelated reason. The manufacturing process for the second battery was not as good as it could have been. This resulted in there being some ‘spikes’ in the inside of the battery which subsequently caused electrode plates to touch again and resulted in the Note 7.2 catching fire again.

Therefore, the smartphone had another poorly designed battery.

A Lesson Learnt?

It is a great that Samsung have identified where the batteries were going wrong with the Note 7. In both cases, they were poorly designed (since the second one, the tolerances in the manufacturing process caused the internal spikes). This is kind of expected though, since if they did not go through this process, how would consumers know that the next generation of smartphones do not explode?

The problem that many have found with this information, though, is how Samsung did not find this when testing the Note 7 through its numerous amounts of tests. How can two major design flaws that cause self-destruction get passed all the checks?
At the end of day, it is in the past and Samsung have upped their tests to complete on batteries. Therefore, it is safe to say nothing like this should happen again.