Perhaps if you’re the sort to keep up with tech trends you must’ve heard about the unfortunate circumstances of the Galaxy Note 7 phone-tablet by Korean electronics manufacturer Samsung. The hapless gadget was in international news for what appeared to be shoddy design, due to experiencing runaway temperatures that led to melting and fire while the Battery is being charged, or even at random when not charged. Failed attempts at a product recall and replacement policy – even the replacement units suffered the same faults – ended up making Samsung something of a consumer pariah to the world.
Now the company’s scrambling to repair their image and drum up interest in their new upcoming smartphone, according to the results of an internal investigation of the phone’s internal systems leaked by an internal source this Monday January 16.
Confirming the known
Just as been initially hypothesized during the height of the "hot" Note 7 panic, the probe conducted by Samsung determined that the phone-tablet’s battery pack was the culprit of their woes. According to an insider source within the company, Samsung plans to officially announce the investigation’s findings through the head of their mobile department Koh Dong-jin next Monday January 23, along with a statement of their new measures to be undertaken to prevent a repeat of the debacle of the exploding battery packs (produced by an outside supplier under license from Samsung).
This is seen as a preliminary step towards the promotion of their upcoming Galaxy S8 smartphone, slated sometime during the first half of this year.
Investors and analysts like Bryan Ma from the IDC research firm in Singapore note the imperativeness of Samsung to come clean of everything that went wrong with the Galaxy Note 7, as well as to reassure buyers that it was a one-off mistake.
The January 23 announcement date is the day prior to the smartphone giant’s fourth-quarter earnings report for the recently concluded year of 2016. No other Samsung spokesperson wishes to comment on this development.
Epic fail
The Samsung Galaxy Note 7 became infamous the year before due to its overloading batteries that ended up causing scares at both homes and public places like aircraft flights.
It was concluded then that the batteries were improperly manufactured by their Samsung SDI Co. Ltd. affiliate, necessitating a second production of Note 7s that were offered as replacement units during the September recall of the phone-tablet. The discovery that the new units were just as prone to the same problems led to a complete halt in Note 7 sales, along with a massive financial loss for Samsung, from which it has yet to recover.
