Samsung’s exploding Galaxy phones might be a spectacular failure, and have currently been pulled from sale. However the same types of issues can blight even the safest handset.
While something seems to have gone seriously wrong with Samsung’s Galaxy Note 7, the identical lithium-ion batteries that are employed in almost each major phone can have many of the identical effects.
The batteries – notoriously unstable but the best for holding charge until one thing higher comes along – will explode and catch fire if they are even slightly damaged.
Those problems have, for instance, led to reports that phones together with iPhones have exploded before they have even reached their owners. And they have led to phone batteries being banned from flights, until they'll be stored in a lot of fireproof packaging.
Such batteries are mostly safe, only exploding if they are hit by or pierced with a giant amount of force or exposed to different extreme conditions. However they are still risky – and solely stay safe as a result of of a delicate balancing act between performance and safety.
It was that kind of downside that initially appeared to be hitting the Samsung phones. The company indicated that there were issues with its batteries – however that those would be fastened with replacement models that will be issued to everyone with one.
If the matter is with the battery, then it's something that would hit any electronic device.
"When planning batteries, there's a trade-off between how long a battery will last between charges and the way safe it is to truly operate. Samsung has probably pushed too so much in the direction of 'performance’,” Professor Harry Hoster, director of energy at Lancaster University, told the Press Association.
"It's genuinely tough to estimate how much the danger of total battery failure may increase by within the pursuit of such performance, since these are rare events that only become countable once the batteries are in mass production - that's, when it's too late."
However the recent explosions seem to suggest that there might be one thing else yet because the battery – either that the first issue was misdiagnosed or that there has been a lot of than one downside with the phones.
Oh Yu-cheon, a senior official at the Korean Agency for Technology and Standards that oversees product remembers, said that the cause of the matter was still being looked into.
"The improved product does not have the identical defect,” said Mr Oh. “That's why we assume there's a replacement defect.”
