Samsung Ships Flameproof Boxes For Note 7 Returns (arstechnica.com) 88
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Samsung has been forced to cease production of its disastrous Galaxy Note 7 Smartphones because they keep catching fire, but it still has to address the problem of cleaning up its mess. The phone has been recalled twice, and owners now have to send their incendiary handsets back to the South Korean firm. And that poses a bit of a problem: if you need to issue a recall for a phone that is prone to spontaneously combust, you don't want those phones catching fire in transit. Samsung's solution is a fancy "Note 7 Return Kit," and it has sent one to XDA Developers. The kit contains a special "Recovery Box" that's lined with ceramic fiber paper to provide some protection against incineration. Samsung warns that some people will have a bad reaction to this lining, so the recovery kit also includes some gloves to protect your hands. They don't appear to be flame retardant, so if your Note 7 is currently ablaze, we'd suggest minimizing contact with it. Samsung also includes a shipping label to send the phone back. The box reinforces that flying ban, noting that the devices are only to be shipped by ground, safely within reach of the quenching hoses of the fire department.
This could have been a simple battery recall (Score:2, Interesting)
Evidence please. (Score:5, Insightful)
They switched the battery cells in production for the first recall. If changing the battery didn't fix the problem, why would changing the battery easier fix it?
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This could have been a simple battery recall if they still used removable batteries.
Yep. How is he 100% certain it isn't a problem with the battery controller chip? Beats me...
Re:You first. (Score:4, Informative)
Let's practice a little logic here, shall we?
Having a problem in the battery cells or pack does not preclude having a problem in the "controller chip" or any other system component. But are we multiplying entities here unnecessarily? Gratuitously attributing failure to the battery when the fires could be attributed to other system components?
No. Because li-ion battery design is supposed to prevent fires in the case of other system components/software being faulty. This is because that battery chemistry is inherently fire-prone: you have a flammable organic electrolyte bathing electrodes that release oxygen, with the entire system subject to thermal runaway. Therefore Li-ion battery packs have to be designed, like a Norman castle, according to the principle of defense-in-depth. It follows directly that any battery fires when the pack is installed in the system require failures in depth.
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" Gratuitously attributing failure to the battery when the fires could be attributed to other system components"
Nope, most other system components can't get that hot if you paid attention to Ohm's Law and did the math yourself.
"No. Because li-ion battery design is supposed to prevent fires in the case of other system components/software being faulty"
Humans that think they can beat physics suffer the consequences of physics. In this case, fire is the consequence.
"This is because that battery chemistry is inh
Re:Evidence please. (Score:4, Informative)
Battery packs often contain current limiters.
If you're installing cells permanently, you will be tempted to do cute things with the charge circuit.
Individual cell charging is common in the RC world. (Chargers are complicated, the market is mostly junk.) It is also common to charge batteries in fire-proof bags.
Lithium batteries in consumer products need to be handled with caution. They aren't $300+ jumbo airplane batteries. If one dying cell kills the pack, that's a fair tradeoff for simplicity plus another level of current limiter.
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These are LiPo batteries we're talking about. AFAIK, they're always a single cell, and I don't think they typically contain any circuitry. If they did, they'd have a four-wire connector like lithium ion packs, rather than two. (Or at least all the flat packs I've seen only have the two wires.)
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They're almost the same voltage/cell.
Anybody know the pack voltage for this thing?
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No, you can get LiPo batteries with protection circuits that are just two-wire only. The other two wires are typically a thermistor connection and a one-wire connection to a gas gauge chip or memory chip to hold stuff
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"Chargers are complicated"
Only because people fail at understanding basic power systems and basic fucking math. I have no problems using a wall wart with exposed wires to charge individual Li-ion cells.
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A quality charger will detect that one of the cells in a pack isn't holding charge as well as the others and exercise that cell automagically, it won't generally fix the cell, but will extend its life.
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Battery packs often contain current limiters
Battery packs often contain current limiters that exclusively protect them from short circuits. That extra terminal on most battery packs is a temperature sensor. Charging and making sure things don't go pop during charging is almost exclusively done outside the battery pack.
In any case this is all conjecture. The stories coming through are of phones spontaneously combusting during operation, not during charging.
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The charge circuit does not go away when it isn't charging. It could still be the problem. As you say it is all conjecture.
Something is shorting (or nearly shorting) the battery.
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Yeah, because encouraging owners to swap out their own batteries with the cheapest Chinese crap they can find will be much safer.
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You are of course assuming Samsung wasn't using the cheapest Chinese crap batteries they could to begin with.
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Re: This could have been a simple battery recall (Score:2)
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It will be interesting to see what Samsung does next for phone branding. The Samsung Phoenix? Sit it out for a couple months until customers forget about it?
Re:This could have been a simple battery recall (Score:5, Insightful)
Removable batteries don't matter if the device itself is somehow leading to the problem for whatever (I've heard some ideas that its the CPU getting too hot, the case expanding/contracting and deforming the battery) reason. Perhaps Samsung could eventually engineer a battery that wouldn't be susceptible to whatever the underlying cause was, but how many months would that take to engineer and properly test and then how many more to produce enough to provide them to every customer. Most customers probably couldn't go without their device for that long, they probably couldn't travel with it even if they were still using it, and without really knowing the whole story or the scope of the problem, six months might by asking a non-trivial amount of people to play Russian roulette with their phone, which is a massive liability issue.
Yes, consumers really like having removable batteries, but if the device itself ensures a greatly reduced lifespan that results in a violent destruction of the battery, does it really matter if it's removable?
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Perhaps Samsung could eventually engineer a battery
LiFePO4 cells can be short-circuited, overheated, even punctured, and they won't catch fire. Oh and they have half the capacity of the "oops I turned into a fireball by accident" chemistry that you can find youtube videos of people puncturing and they catch fire.
I don't think there are many phone makers out there willing to sacrifice half their run time for safety, but the technology exists.
Citation required (Score:2, Troll)
> consumers really like having removable batteries
Pretty much all the best-selling smartphones have non-removable batteries.
Did you mean to say "the completely irrelevant smug technorati at Slashdot really like having removable batteries"?
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The thing is, even if a removable battery doesn't cut down on fire incidents, it would have made the phones a lot easier to ship back to the manufacturer. Rather than go through all these hoops with fire-resistant boxes and ground-only shipping, they could simply have told people "Keep the phone powered off and bring it to an electronics recycler or an authorized seller to have the battery taken out and the phone shipped back to Samsung".
I can easily see UPS and Fedex refusing to ship the returned phones, s
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Suppose we use your theory, and take a Samsung firebomb back to the retailer.
They remove the battery.
What happens then? Where does it go? How does it get there?
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Oh. It's the local "recycler" who has to deal with the firebombs.
No thanks.
A Brand To Protect (Score:2)
... massive liability issue.
The massive liability issue is half of it. The other half is that Samsung has a brand to protect, and is smart enough to know that no single product is worth destroying their brand.
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Yes consumers really like having removable batteries
[Citation needed] for the most part as far as I can see, outside of a few slashdot posters consumers couldn't give a crap about a removable battery.
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Removable batteries don't matter if the device itself is somehow leading to the problem for whatever (I've heard some ideas that its the CPU getting too hot, the case expanding/contracting and deforming the battery) reason.
A removable battery might well solve this problem, because it is better-protected than the bare foil packs that they use in phones without removable batteries.
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I don't think the push for thinness helps. Similar to how the iPhone 6 is experiencing issues with dying screens (due to flex on one of the related chips), perhaps what's happening is some important trace/component is being shorted because the overly-thin device is able to flex enough to cause Bad Things (tm) to happen, e.g. breaking a solder, having two components touch that aren't supposed to, etc
Things are pretty crammed inside these phones, so it wouldn't take much for an unintended short to occur even
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Or that could have made it worse as customers bought $5 Chinese knock-off batteries as spares.
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The Gang that Couldn't Shoot Straight (Score:2)
They're sending out boxes for their potential firebombs that require gloves to handle?
Clearly they realize that sending something that could spontaneously catch fire in the mail or through couriers is a significant concern, but wouldn't it make more sense to set up return centres at carrier retail locatdions where the phones could be loaded with a "discharge app" (put the display on full brightness, run the speaker at full volume with an inaudible signal, turn on the radios without broadcasting, etc.) to ma
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Other alternatives (Score:4, Funny)
It would be safer if the devices were frozen in carbonite for return shipping.
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No, because frozen things tend to be less explodey, thus this is smart.
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I think they are waterproof.
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now only if they were fireproof...
How the mighty have fallen! (Score:2)
"Back in the day", I had a Samsung slider that was pretty much bulletproof. Long battery life, very primitive internet capability (but enough to let you search for information or check email), and a tolerance for punishment that verged on masochism. And it could get a signal where a lot of phones couldn't.
Ever since, they seem to have gotten into some kind of death spiral where their phones look great and offer steadily increasing capabilities, but reliability has declined to the point where they're now t
Potentially unlawful ? (Score:2)
Worst of all, if one does catch fire in transit, the sender (not Samsung) will be liable for the consequences.
It's really disappointing to see a company like Samsung handle this so badly
The only sensible option is to return it to the point of sale for a refund. Failing that, people should be contacting Samsung so that they
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That is what the special box with markings indicating the contents, and prepaid ground postage are for. This isn't the first device with a defective li-ion battery and UPS has procedures in place to deal with it.
This is completely normal for battery recalls (Score:5, Informative)
Useful advice (Score:2)
. Uh, thanks?
Galaxy Note smartphone (Score:1)
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Err... you do realize that design of a product like this is a team effort? What you would need is a conspiracy of engineers to seriously undermine, possibly even destroy the business division that employed them.
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1. your tinfoil hat needs adjustment.
2. Why would an optical engineer be working on batteries and charging circuits? That's what electrical engineers and chemical engineers are for.
QA ?? (Score:2)
I'm just curious how the hell this problem got past their QA department?
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I'm just curious how the hell this problem got past their QA department?
Because they sold millions of them and a few dozen have caught fire. Kinda hard to thoroughly run millions of units through a QA department.
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Why wasn't production in the millions? The recall covers 2.5 million units.
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"Kinda hard to thoroughly run millions of units through a QA department."
No, not really, even with an actual staff of QA engineers vs automated tools.
Source: I did the QA on every LED light I've sold, Hydroponics system I've built, and very building I've constructed, plus I continuously do QA on every mine I currently own as I continue to prospect further into mountains. People that know what they're doing will find the flaws very early on.
Why the "static shielding bag?" (Score:2)
Since these phones will only be recycled, why bother with the static shielding bag?!
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Probably because it costs 5 cents to make sure there isn't a static discharge that could potentially cause a battery fire while these things are being tossed around a shipping company's logistics center, or bouncing about in the back of a truck?
Flameproof? (Score:2)
Challenge fuckin accepted. Where do I get one?
I love that dept tagline (Score:2)
I looked around to see any footage of exploding washing machines, found this Hotpoint that seemed quite formidable as it kept going instead of just abruptly stopping after first breakage, https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]