And I hear they'll rename it the Galaxy "Lottery of Death" 7 since you will be gambling with your life for the 7 days you'll use it before it bursts into life, er fire.
Samsung plans Galaxy Note 7 fire sale
Samsung's revealed it will soon start selling the Galaxy Note 7 again. The phablet crashed and burned last year after Samsung pushed its battery-makers too far, leading to cut corners that made the devices go up in flames. The phablet ignited a firestorm of controversy that saw it banned from planes and Now the company has …
COMMENTS
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Tuesday 28th March 2017 01:10 GMT Eric Olson
In all honesty...
I miss my Note 7.
No, not the idea of my pants catching fire while I was on a hyperbolic rant.
But as a phone, it was damn good. It was fast, the screen was great, and I could come home with more than 10% of a charge left. Obviously that last bit was the problem... so it wasn't perfect.
I have the LG V20 now. It's fine. I used my wife's S7. It's fine. The S7 Edge was fine. Everything available at the time was fine. But the Note 7 was good... even great. And some government-bribing idiot (or his underlings) had to try to fuck Fate in the ear by cramming something too big into the intended cavity.
I may never forgive Samsung for ruining a good product with an engineering gaffe that I'm sure will come out in the future as a "We told you not to..." Probably some moronic VP or executive demanded that this whiz-bang cell be put into the Note 7 because the dimensions were just a hair smaller than the battery hollow in the PDF of the technical drawings.
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Tuesday 28th March 2017 05:55 GMT Flocke Kroes
You are overestimating PHBs
Finding the relevant PDF is well beyond the ability of a PHB. If a techy left one visible on his computer or left hard copy lying around the PHB would not even try to read it. The more likely scenario is a PHB got hold of a sample battery and enclosure, measured them with a ruler and decided that they ought to fit together.
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Tuesday 28th March 2017 05:42 GMT Steve Davies 3
why oh why?
Airlines will still not let you fly with one so why bother.
Unless the owner has 'My Note 7 is refurbed' tattoed on their forehead how can they be expected to know that this device is not an unrefurbed one?
Yes, this device has caused a massive dent in the bottom line but have Samsung given any thought to the total shitstorm that will hit them if even on refurbed device goes badly wrong?
That could signal the end of the company, well certainly in the mobile space.
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Tuesday 28th March 2017 06:25 GMT Charlie Clark
Re: why oh why?
They can only sell them again if they can convince authorities (including the FAA) that they're safe, or as safe as any other phones anyway. But, if they can do this, then why shouldn't they sell them? Potential battery issues aside they seemed to have been very popular with owners.
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Tuesday 28th March 2017 08:29 GMT Dave 126
Re: why oh why?
>Yes, this device has caused a massive dent in the bottom line but have Samsung given any thought to the total shitstorm that will hit them if even on refurbed device goes badly wrong? That could signal the end of the company, well certainly in the mobile space.
Eh? Hey Steve, don't mistake the many column inches about the Note's battery for actual financial statistics. Samsung, unlike Apple, make dozens of different models, of which the Note was just one. The Galaxy line is probably more popular, and (now my turn to take anecdotal evidence of chasing down statistics!) supermarkets stock a lot of something called a J5 and I can only assume they are selling them.
As HipposRule pointed out, Samsung's electronics division enjoyed healthy profits last year, though this wasn't reported as heavily (though that is the nature of news: Fire!!! = exciting, Numbers = boring)
We will take your point that of Samsung were daft enough to re-re-release (I've lost track) the Note 7 with batteries that get overly warm it would be a PR misstep, but not a critical one. And hey, unlike the original recall which appears to have been a bit panicked, Samsung have since taken their time and there is every likelyhood that it will be a safe as the millions of other phones they sell.
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Tuesday 28th March 2017 10:44 GMT Voland's right hand
Re: why oh why?
Airlines will still not let you fly with one so why bother.
If it has the battery permanently exorcised I would not mind having it for a house control display. I am trying to hack something around an ancient 6 inch tablet for these purposes and it does not have the processing power I need - especially for CCTV :(
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Tuesday 28th March 2017 11:10 GMT ukaudiophile
Re: why oh why?
If the price was right (for Samsung right now, shipping these out at <£200 would be about right, better than zero) I would buy one (or two) without hesitation. I've used the original Note, Note 2 & Note 4, each one was excellent, so I'm sure the 7 would be superb now they have the battery issue resolved.
As for taking them on airlines, I don't care, I don't fly.
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Tuesday 28th March 2017 07:50 GMT GruntyMcPugh
Re: ET Atari games
.. there was an episode of 'Elementary' where Sherlock and Holmes were investigating a case which involved video games that had been sent to a landfill site, and yes, the game was allegedly a stinker.
But, despite this parody muddying the waters, I'm pretty sure the burial site was discovered some years ago, and this is what inspired 'Elementary'?
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Tuesday 28th March 2017 08:38 GMT Dave 126
Re: ET Atari games
> where Sherlock and Holmes
Hehe, he's a recovering drug addict, not Jekyll and Hyde! But yeah, it's a watchable show and it does more than many other shows borrow from contemporary cultural phenomena, such as a plot about professional video game players (when did that happen?!) being bribed with strippers.
However, there was an actual bona fide documentary about the E.T. cartridge landfill recently. Even more geekily, there's a website about a man's efforts to fix the game:
http://www.neocomputer.org/projects/et/
Worth a read in my opinion. But then I'm a weirdo :)
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Tuesday 28th March 2017 17:27 GMT Law
Re: ET Atari games
I quite like Elementary - and just like "Everyone" parodies Anonymous, the game thing was a parody of ET being landfilled by Atari.
Atari: Game Over is the documentary - it's on Netflix - watched that too. Made me feel bad for Warshaw (who designed/wrote the game) - he was extremely good at his job, but basically agreed to an impossible deadline and destroyed his development career in the process.
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Tuesday 28th March 2017 11:24 GMT handleoclast
Re: Environmentally friendly disposal
"Which country, untainted by the publicity of phones going nuclear, is going to get them... Kazakhstan?!"
At the right price, there are people in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, etc. who would love these phones. As trigger mechanisms for IEDs they offer the possibility of detonation by timer, remote control, and movement. Plus, if the detonator cap is defective, the battery can be made to explode.
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Tuesday 28th March 2017 08:39 GMT cb7
Huh?
I'm not sure I (or anyone) except Samsung know(s) the real reason why this was not a fixable problem.
If the problem was simply that the battery compartment was too small leading to batteries getting compressed during expansion, then clearly yes, it would be difficult or impossible to enlarge the compartment on existing stock.
However, I'm sure it wouldn't be impossible for a company the size of Samsung to replace the batteries with physically slightly smaller ones? Sure, it would mean giving up on a tiny bit of capacity, but surely a better compromise than a strakght loss of $3.2Bn?
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Tuesday 28th March 2017 10:46 GMT King Jack
Battey Problems?
If they simply kept the loved feature of a removable battery, this would have been a non existent problem. Just recall and swap the defective batteries. I hope they get burned and learn not to follow stupid trends in the future. Removing features is a thing pioneered by Sony.
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Tuesday 28th March 2017 12:52 GMT Stevie
Bah!
It seems to me that one might place a dense stack of these phones as a core, then surround it with a geodesic "sphere" of more phones, then attach even more phones at equidistant points on the vertices of the geodesic shell, then make one call from several miles away as a handy atoll removal scheme.
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Tuesday 28th March 2017 13:33 GMT dajames
Not so daft ...
The battery and/or the battery compartment seem to be the problem -- those and the fact that nobody trusts the "Note 7" brand any more.
So, Make new cases with "Note 8" on them, having slightly larger and more rigid -- and user accessible -- battery compartments so the battery has room to expand with charging, and won't be damaged by bending of the case. If necessary throw out the old batteries and use new ones made to better tolerances.
Reflash the innards to use the "Note 8" name (and run Nougat, if they didn't already).
Profit! (or at least amortize the loss).
It was, by all accounts a good phone (albeit at more than I'd choose to pay) and if it can be made safe it should be used.
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Friday 31st March 2017 09:20 GMT Conundrum1885
Re. High Frequency Trading
Actually feasible, the big problem has been wiping the memory.
I have since determined that an invert + zero ie writing the logical opposite to the memory directly to force all cells to "11" then write all zeros is the most efficient way to erase flash memory for reuse in the field.
Its gentler on the chips and if any fail this test then they get stripped down and recycled.
Plus all the firmware updates can be added so that annoying b0rked sensor is fixed, from what I have learned the new iris sensor is similar but using better software and a dual rather than single colour sensor plus fluid lens to increase its focal depth.
I also found evidence that many "new" SSDs are in fact repaired or reprogrammed units that failed initial tests at the factory, the bad chip replaced and sometimes even just the controller is upgraded with 2013 chips being upcycled and reused.
The giveaway is that the speed will be much lower than a 2G V-NAND.