Now that Samsung’s Galaxy Note 7s have caught fire even after the phone-maker said it had changed battery suppliers, and the real cause of overheating remains a mystery, the Korean tech giant is facing new questions about its transparency throughout the recall debacle.
It has been a week since Samsung pulled the plug on what had been slated to be its flagship high-end smartphone. Samsung began recalling the devices for posing a fire hazard a month and a half ago. Reports about the fires started coming in almost two months ago.
We still don’t know what’s causing the batteries to overheat.
“The challenge with all this is, you know, we don’t want to say something too early,” says a Samsung executive, speaking anonymously to discuss an ongoing investigation. “Obviously, we had one recall, we thought things were OK after that — they weren’t. So we have to be very, very certain this time that it’s clear what’s going on.”
The company’s representatives are loath to broach anything related to the inquiry, which they say is continuing “around the clock.” It’s unclear whether Samsung or U.S. government engineers have been able to replicate the fires reported by users, how much testing the replacement Note 7 batteries underwent in the days before or during the recall — or what evidence pointed at batteries as the culprit to begin with.
“All of those things will have to be discussed as part of the whole investigation into what happened and what were the reasons and why did the engineers think at that point there were certain things,” the Samsung executive told NPR.
“Nobody really knows what went wrong,” says Avi Greengart, devices analyst at Current Analysis. “If Samsung knows, it isn’t saying — and that’s a problem. And if Samsung doesn’t know — well, that’s a whole other kind of problem.”
In a way, it’s a toss-up between lack of disclosure, if the problem is known, and lack of accountability, if the causes of early fire reports were unknown or misdiagnosed, but blamed on the battery supplier nonetheless.
Samsung officials say their priority is to reclaim both the original Note 7s and the updated Note 7s issued as their replacement — and to regain customers’ trust. But even some South Korean customers, for whom Samsung is tied to patriotism, have expressed frustration with the company’s communication throughout the ordeal.
“We will get to the bottom of the issue and find the cause,” says Samsung spokeswoman Kelly Yeo. “We will do everything in our power to make what’s wrong, right.”
The moving pieces
The widely floated theory suggests that Samsung’s inflammable-battery woes began with the rush to beat Apple to market with the latest, most unique smartphone.
Galaxy Note 7 was that: waterproof, large, bright, with curved glass and a built-in stylus. And the company did have a precedent of success from an expedited release of another smartphone, Greengart says: Galaxy S7 had come out a month ahead of the typical 12-month cycle, producing a big jump in sales and profit.
Things, of course, took a different turn after the August release of the Note 7 — though both phones were presumably tested in the same facility, which Samsung says it has been using for some seven years.
The peculiar thing about the lab is that it belongs directly to Samsung, as the company appears to be the only major phone-maker to rely on an in-house testing facility rather than an independent one. The U.S. wireless trade association, CTIA, had certified the lab, and the group says Samsung’s is “the first known issue” since the certification program began in 2008.
The first recall —2.5 million Note 7s globally, 1 million in the U.S. — followed the first wave of reports of flaming phones. In a hastily arranged Sept. 2 news conference, Samsung’s mobile chief Dongjin Koh pegged the issue on “a tiny problem in the manufacturing process,” and that remains the closest the company has come to identifying the cause.