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United States Hardware

Samsung Knew a Third Replacement Note 7 Caught Fire On Tuesday and Said Nothing (theverge.com) 110

Posted by msmash from the not-cool,-samsung dept.
If you had started to feel sympathetic for Samsung, or safer with the Note 7, its latest flagship smartphone, don't be. Another replacement Samsung Galaxy Note 7 has caught fire, making it three of such incident this week alone. Read how poorly Samsung has dealt with the situation, via The Verge: This one was owned by Michael Klering of Nicholasville, Kentucky. He told WKYT that he woke up at 4AM to find his bedroom filled with smoke and his phone on fire. Later in the day, he went to the hospital with acute bronchitis caused by smoke inhalation. "The phone is supposed to be the replacement, so you would have thought it would be safe," Klering told WKYT, saying that he had owned the replacement phone for a little more than a week. "It wasn't plugged in. It wasn't anything, it was just sitting there."The most unsettling part is that Samsung knew of Klering's phone, and didn't say anything.
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Samsung Knew a Third Replacement Note 7 Caught Fire On Tuesday and Said Nothing More

Samsung Knew a Third Replacement Note 7 Caught Fire On Tuesday and Said Nothing

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  • well.. (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    I left my Samsung Phone in my Tesla and they both went up in flames. Now what should I do?

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward
      you should now troll on irc.

  • Cue The Apologists (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Tell me how this is a good thing for Samsung and how bad this is for Apple.

    I know the drill here.

    • Re:Cue The Apologists (Score:5, Funny)

      by sjames ( 1099 ) on Sunday October 09, 2016 @02:23PM (#53042917) Homepage Journal

      If you find yourself stranded on a desert island with an iPhone and no bars, you're screwed. If you have the superior Samsung phone, just activate the signal flare feature when a plane goes by.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by wbr1 ( 2538558 )

        If you find yourself stranded on a desert island with an iPhone and no bars, you're screwed. If you have the superior Samsung phone, just activate the signal flare feature when a plane goes by.

        Except for the fact that you are stranded on the island because you phone caught fire and crashed your flight.

    • It's almost as if you don't know there's a place on the Internet where you can type "iphone fire" and make an objective comparison.

      All this is just media frenzy, Samsung is no worse than anybody else. Does anybody else remember "Nokia fire" back in the day?

  • Issue with batteries or with phone design? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by alvinrod ( 889928 ) on Sunday October 09, 2016 @12:56PM (#53042525)
    I'm beginning to wonder if it's an issue with something other than just the battery. Otherwise Samsung would be incredibly idiotic to send out replacement parts that suffer from the same problem. The alternatives are that a massive mistake led to sending out defective units as replacements without fixing them first, or that Samsung's battery supplier (I think I read that the source all or most of them from third parties) wasn't fully aware of the extend of their problems and have shipped more bad batteries.

    • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Samsung has had a lot of quality control issues. My Note 4 could no longer charge after a year because the USB port quit working, making the phone basically worthless. When I looked it up, apparently this is a very well known issue that impacts almost every phone Samsung makes.

      captcha: freezers

      • Samsung has had a lot of quality control issues.

        So has Apple. Your point is...?

      • "Hey boss, I think I found a bug, but I'm not sure. Can we hire about 10 really expensive consultants to help get down to the root cause?"
        "Can't afford it. I know you're just a software guy, but read some docs and design a test plan for it. By thursday."

    • Samsung was overwhelmed and could have bet on probabilities, the unlikeliness that a different batch would yield the same problem (given that only a few devices had problems out of millions).

    • I'm beginning to wonder if it's an issue with something other than just the battery. Otherwise Samsung would be incredibly idiotic to send out replacement parts that suffer from the same problem.

      How are these two sentences even remotely related?

      Maybe the problem isn't the battery but maybe it is.
      If Samsung knew there's a problem with replacement units it is idiotic to send them out, if not it wasn't. This has nothing at all to do with if it was or wasn't the battery.

    • This is an indication of a huge problem in Samsung's management in so many ways. Competent engineers all over the world understand the design & manufacturing & use issues.

      High level managers had to pressure the "Note 7" division leaders to ignore everything but getting their advanced phone out in front of the iPhone. Heads must roll.,

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by arth1 ( 260657 )

      The alternatives are that a massive mistake led to sending out defective units as replacements without fixing them first, or that Samsung's battery supplier (I think I read that the source all or most of them from third parties) wasn't fully aware of the extend of their problems and have shipped more bad batteries.

      Or that they didn't correctly identify the root cause, but grabbed the first possible cause as gospel, and went from there.

    • It's up to 5 now!

  • "...what he keeps threatening to do do" (Score:4, Interesting)

    by JoeyRox ( 2711699 ) on Sunday October 09, 2016 @12:59PM (#53042547)
    The full Samsung text message was "Just now got this. I can try and slow him down if we think it will matter, or we just let him do what he keeps threatening to do and see if he does it"

    Someone Mr. Klering conveniently failed to share with the news station what exactly he was threatening to do against Samsung that lead to that text message exchange between Samsung employees and which accidentally reached him instead. I'm guessing it was something more than just "I'm going to share what happened to my phone with the authorities".

    • I am guessing this guy tried to blackmail Samsung for lots of money. Which actually makes the whole story suspect. You would think The Verge could do better reporting.

    • He threatened to sue most likely. And?

      • Well the thrust of the article is that it accuses Samsung of hiding this battery event from the media. Yet that's exactly what this guy did by posing a threat to Samsung first. Why wouldn't he just go to the media to share what happened if his interest was really public safety? Sharing what happened wouldn't have precluded him from suing Samsung as well. So it's clear the guys' intentions are suspect here.

        • Re:"...what he keeps threatening to do do" (Score:4, Interesting)

          by Lunix Nutcase ( 1092239 ) on Sunday October 09, 2016 @02:10PM (#53042857)

          Because he was in the hospital and trying to work with Samsung until he got that message sent to him?

        • I've found that a lot of people just want to "make themselves whole" in the legal sense, meaning they want to recover what they feel has been unjustly taken from them.

          For many, advocating for the public good takes a back seat to that recovery; just think about all of the times that one reads of a settlement that was reached with the provision that the injured party not discuss the matter with anybody.

          Thus he might have been engaging in such a discussion with Samsung, or at least intending to do so.

        • Re: (Score:1)

          by Joosy ( 787747 )

          So it's clear the guys' intentions are suspect here.

          And from TFA:

          Samsung asked Klering if they could take possession of the phone and he said no

          Nice of him to want to help solve the problem by letting them examine the phone to try and find the cause.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Zocalo ( 252965 )
        And... once you threaten to sue, lawyers tend to step in and insist that any and all correspondance relating to the matter be routed through them. Needless to say, this causes delays, even when it really shouldn't like in safety cases such as this. Besides, if it caught fire on Tuesday AM, Klering's priority would have been dealing with the fire then his bronchitis rather than informing Samsung, so figure late Tuesday or even Wednesday before that happened (at the earliest), then a little back and forth w

  • It's up to 5 replacement devices now. (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2016/10/were-now-up-to-five-reports-of-safe-galaxy-note-7s-exploding-worldwide/

  • Is Samsung now in the circle the wagons mindset regarding problems with their latest phone?

  • Samsung: We don't need no recall, let the motherfucker burn

    Customer: None of you did anything to prevent this!
    Samsung: There was nothing we could do! We were totally unprepared for this.
    Customer: Oh don't give me unprepared! You knew then! And you did nothing!

    Samsung: We didn't start the fire. Blame it on the battery yeah yeah.

  • fpmita prison time and it happen on air plane so they can Throw the book at them

  • Is it unsettling that a company who's in the middle of a problem doesn't straight away come out and shout from the hills when they find a case (probably yet to be investigated) that makes the situation worse?

    Does the submitter even live on planet earth let alone know how businesses normally operate?

  • So the big allegation is that a Samsung didn't announce this for a couple days? Shouldn't they investigate it before issuing a press release?

    Their phones are literally starting on fire. That's bad enough. There's no need to hype it into a big secret conspiracy based on when the announcement occurred.

  • Samsung has sold millions of these things. Three of them have caught fire. That makes the odds of a device catching fire less than 1 in 1,000,000. Business Insider [businessinsider.com] says that 17 cars catch fire every hour. Where are the cries for recalling cars?

    • Samsung has sold millions of these things. Three of them have caught fire. That makes the odds of a device catching fire less than 1 in 1,000,000. Business Insider says that 17 cars catch fire every hour. Where are the cries for recalling cars?

      I'm going to keep a copy of your post for safe keeping. This "what about y" device is constantly being invoked as justification for everything from mass surveillance to red rum so often in so many different contexts it usually makes me cringe/sigh Al Gore style whenever I encounter it.

      Boldly inquiring about cries for recalling products that catch on fire takes it to a whole new level.

      http://www.reuters.com/article... [reuters.com]

      http://q13fox.com/2016/09/30/s... [q13fox.com]

      http://abcnews.go.com/Business... [go.com]

      http://www.techtimes.com/ [techtimes.com]

      • You pretty forcefully made my point. There are literally millions of cars with fire troubles. No one gets on TV and tells us to stop using cars. No one thinks that a car fire is the most important risk of using a car, nor should they. Yet when Samsung "hides" the fact that three of their devices caught fire, we rain fire and brimstone on them.

        The entire point was that the risk may have been a bit overblown. Yes, of course, for the unlucky three people, the impact can be terrible, even catastrophic. Bu

        • You pretty forcefully made my point. There are literally millions of cars with fire troubles. No one gets on TV and tells us to stop using cars. No one thinks that a car fire is the most important risk of using a car, nor should they. Yet when Samsung "hides" the fact that three of their devices caught fire, we rain fire and brimstone on them.

          When there are vehicle defects discovered that are known fire hazards vehicles are recalled and people DO get on TV and send letters and make telephone calls to let people know to get their vehicles fixed. The same to varying degrees applies to every other product you purchase with known defects rendering the product unsafe.

          https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
          https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
          https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
          https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]

          The entire point was that the risk may have been a bit overblown. Yes, of course, for the unlucky three people, the impact can be terrible, even catastrophic. But like it or not, life has risks. When you walk outside, you risk your life. When you walk inside, you risk your life. If one of those remote risks became reality for you, ending your life, that would be terrible for you, but that risk should not keep us all from going outside, or inside.

          This is not a falsifiable statement. Just because r

    • I don't know where you are getting your "facts", but there have been much more than 3 phones catching fire.

      As of September 15, 2016, the US CPSC reported 26 reports of burns and 55 reports of property damage, including fires in cars and a garage. [cpsc.gov]

      As of October 10, 2016, there have been at least 5 reports of replacement phones catching fire [theverge.com].

      I have bought rechargeable batteries for the last 20 years. Not a single one of them has caught fire. In the case of the Galaxy Note 7, there is obviously a single,

      • The 3 reports (now 5) are of the replacement Galaxy Note 7's. So let's use your numbers, totaling 81 fires. By contrast, there have been millions of car fires, but you don't see people on TV telling you not to drive cars because the products are so dangerous! (See other thread on this topic for more details on that, including sources.)

        • Your logic is faulty. In this smartphone case, there is one manufacturer, Samsung, and one product, the Galaxy Note 7. It is clear there is a defect. In the case of your "millions of car fires", they are generally spread out randomly over all manufacturers and models. If there is ever a specific case, such as GM's faulty ignition switches in particular models from particular years, then yes, there will be a recall and people on TV will tell folks not to drive those models.
  • Nothing quite gets across the impression of a half-baked, wonky website than a summary written like that. Pretend to be factual, for fucks sakes, even if it breaks your little heart to do it.
  • What did Samsung know about his phone? And why would Samsung need to say anything to the media? my god what kind of crap reporting is this, and what kind of childish behavior of "I need to know everything, if they didn't say anything about it they should have, otherwise they are bad, bad.. oh daddy please make them say everything, I want to know it".

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