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US carriers halt Samsung Note 7 sales and replacements

bbc.com

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Re: US carriers halt Samsung Note 7 sales and replacements

#41

Post by mrmondo »

This adds to Samsung's long covered up history of phones that kill SDcards, bloated batteries, uncompliant USB spec connections, under-specced voltage regulators throughout, cheap USB chargers suspected as built to fail, screen colour imperfections and second hand parts discovered in new phones discovered during new phone tear downs. They regularly spend so much more money on advertising on bus stops and trains than they ever have on r&d for any product. The parts they sell to other vendors for rebranding etc... are almost always custom, higher grade built to order parts, for example their nvme pcie drives sold to Apple are built to much higher standards and they run completely custom Apple firmware, and guess what? They don't fail or fire.

Samsung are a straight out dodgy company - they're the Microsoft of hardware but with better advertising, unfortunately targeted towards people of slightly lower social status often.

Re: US carriers halt Samsung Note 7 sales and replacements

#42

Post by Something1234 »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #23
userbinator wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Samsung said in a statement last month that the issue of overheating was caused by a "rare" manufacturing error that resulted in the battery's "anode-to-cathode [negative and positive electrodes]" coming into contact. Looks like the fault is in the batteries, internal shorts are both uncommon and also extremely dangerous since they will essentially dissipate all the energy in the cell as heat and can't be stopped ext…

This is partially why I'm wary of devices with batteries which aren't easily removable... This argument is made all the time, but I don't understand it. If the batteries were removable, a large number of owners would eventually replace them with low-quality Chinese lithium batteries whose brand names contain the word "Fire" somewhere. The result will be, big surprise, more fires. The difference is that there won't be…

Or PureDick. I got a crap laptop battery under that name.

Puredick® New Laptop Battery for Dell Precision M6400 M6500, fits C565C G102C F678F KR854 8M039 5K145 DW554 P267P -12 Months Warranty[Li-ion 9-cell 11.1V 90Wh] https://www.amazon.com/dp/B018VAY2RW/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_2VZ-...

Re: US carriers halt Samsung Note 7 sales and replacements

#43

Post by B1FF_PSUVM »

Inconel wrote: post #38
usaphp wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't "burn in" a big drawback for OLED screens?

From what I've read online the newer generation Samsung displays, those from say the last 1-2 years, have supposedly made big strides in dealing with "burn in". Apparently it's much less of an issue now, although still more common than LCD. Also, if I understand correctly, OLED doesn't actually suffer from "burn in" like LCD does, instead it's more "burn out" as the pixels, particularly the blue ones, degrade faster…

The Lumia 925 from 2013 had a gorgeous OLED display, and no burn-in or ghosting problems that I noticed for a couple of years.

They did take care of shifting the (beautiful, built-in) nightstand clock screen a bit around, I think.

(Adjustable color reproduction, you could go for "vivid" if you wanted, normal was fine.)

Re: US carriers halt Samsung Note 7 sales and replacements

#44

Post by Inconel »

acchow wrote: post #27
CountSessine wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really hope it doesn't turn out to be fatal for them but I also hope it breaks the Samsung monopoly over Android and let brands like LG, HTC shine. OLED displays are so good they still sell themselves, and Samsung is the only handset maker that seems to be committed to the technology. I doubt this will change much.

What's so great about OLEDs? They consume much more energy and don't produce the most accurate colors.

I'm fairly sure the new OLED displays from Samsung can produce extremely accurate colors. I don't remember exactly where I read so, perhaps AnandTech, but I believe the Samsung displays were considered some of the most accurate smartphone displays prior to the new iPhones.

I should note that for some reason it seems like most smartphone manufacturers, basically everyone aside from Apple, way oversaturate their displays, this is especially true in the case of Samsung. Even the Nexus 6P display looked horrendous to me out of the box. Fortunately there is a setting in the developer options to enable sRGB mode which makes a huge difference.

Regarding power consumption, I think OLED mostly loses out on efficiency when generating white backgrounds, but I'm not sure how much of a battery hit this causes in normal use scenarios.

As to what's so great about OLED, for me, as someone who frequently uses their phone in relatively low light situations, I absolutely love the deep blacks and the fact that when I have the phone on low brightness using a dark theme it barely produces any ambient light. On that note, Google seriously needs to introduce a system wide dark theme. I don't have an iPhone but I'm really interested to see if/when Apple adopts OLED whether they redesign iOS to take advantage of it. I know many people dislike the bright white UI of iOS and Android.

Re: US carriers halt Samsung Note 7 sales and replacements

#45

Post by B1FF_PSUVM »

Uupis wrote: post #24
paulcole wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You mean except for 12 or 24 months from now when the OLED iPhone is announced.

With the strong push for color _quality_ (please excuse my lack of a better term) on iOS devices lately, I find the OLED-equipped iPhone rumors a bit confounding. Last I recall they looked a bit off. Nice, but a bit off. That said, my experience with OLED screens is a bit dated, so maybe the color reproduction has improved.

I expect paulcole is right ...

I was recently in the market for a phone, and considering an iPhone SE. But unfortunately I've got hooked on Lumia OLEDs, so I'm taking one last cheap hit from the rapidly cooling MS pipe while Apple gets that duck lined up ;-)

Re: US carriers halt Samsung Note 7 sales and replacements

#46

Post by breakingcups »

mrmondo wrote: post #41

This adds to Samsung's long covered up history of phones that kill SDcards, bloated batteries, uncompliant USB spec connections, under-specced voltage regulators throughout, cheap USB chargers suspected as built to fail, screen colour imperfections and second hand parts discovered in new phones discovered during new phone tear downs. They regularly spend so much more money on advertising on bus stops and trains than…

[citation needed]

Re: US carriers halt Samsung Note 7 sales and replacements

#47

Post by Inconel »

B1FF_PSUVM wrote: post #43
Inconel wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From what I've read online the newer generation Samsung displays, those from say the last 1-2 years, have supposedly made big strides in dealing with "burn in". Apparently it's much less of an issue now, although still more common than LCD. Also, if I understand correctly, OLED doesn't actually suffer from "burn in" like LCD does, instead it's more "burn out" as the pixels, particularly the blue ones, degrade faster…

The Lumia 925 from 2013 had a gorgeous OLED display, and no burn-in or ghosting problems that I noticed for a couple of years. They did take care of shifting the (beautiful, built-in) nightstand clock screen a bit around, I think. (Adjustable color reproduction, you could go for "vivid" if you wanted, normal was fine.)

I had no idea the Lumia clock screen did that, it's a simple but brilliant solution to mitigate the problem. I'd love to see more work go into subtly shifting persistent UI elements around to avoid the issue. In particular I'd like to see the navigation keys and status bar on Android adopt something like that. I wonder if the UI elements would even need to shift locations or if it would be enough to shift colors so it isn't one particular color that degrades unevenly.

Re: US carriers halt Samsung Note 7 sales and replacements

#48

Post by jacquesm »

sho_hn wrote: post #34
userbinator wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe Samsung doesn't make the batteries. Whoever does, however, is probably not feeling too good... It also means that this could've easily happened to another company's phones; remember the laptop fires a few years ago (Apple, Dell, IBM, Toshiba, etc. all issued recalls) that were determined to originate from defective Sony cells?

Samsung Electronics doesn't make the batteries - but Samsung SDI do, along with Chinese Amperex Technology (for the third sold in China). My understanding is that both devices with SSDI and with Amperex batteries have caught on fire (IIRC there have been failures inside and outside of China), so maybe a chassis design defect subjecting the batteries to unexpected strain? Samsung SDI also manufacture iPhone batteries.

> so maybe a chassis design defect subjecting the batteries to unexpected strain?

It should take more than a little bit of unexpected strain to ignite a consumer electronics device.

Re: US carriers halt Samsung Note 7 sales and replacements

#49

Post by sho_hn »

jacquesm wrote: post #48
sho_hn wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Samsung Electronics doesn't make the batteries - but Samsung SDI do, along with Chinese Amperex Technology (for the third sold in China). My understanding is that both devices with SSDI and with Amperex batteries have caught on fire (IIRC there have been failures inside and outside of China), so maybe a chassis design defect subjecting the batteries to unexpected strain? Samsung SDI also manufacture iPhone batteries.

> so maybe a chassis design defect subjecting the batteries to unexpected strain? It should take more than a little bit of unexpected strain to ignite a consumer electronics device.

Sure, I'm just saying blaming it on the battery manufacturer becomes a harder sell when two manufacturers are affected, unless Samsung Electronics proscribed the specs so tightly it's their design flaw, or they made the manufacturing equipment, or the batteries' operating environment (i.e. the phone) is a factor. Or SSDI and Amperex could have sold manufacturing tech to each other, I suppose.

Re: US carriers halt Samsung Note 7 sales and replacements

#50

Post by [deleted] »

jacquesm wrote: post #48
sho_hn wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Samsung Electronics doesn't make the batteries - but Samsung SDI do, along with Chinese Amperex Technology (for the third sold in China). My understanding is that both devices with SSDI and with Amperex batteries have caught on fire (IIRC there have been failures inside and outside of China), so maybe a chassis design defect subjecting the batteries to unexpected strain? Samsung SDI also manufacture iPhone batteries.

> so maybe a chassis design defect subjecting the batteries to unexpected strain? It should take more than a little bit of unexpected strain to ignite a consumer electronics device.

[deleted]
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