Samsung confirms Note 7 batteries to blame, implements new safety checks

Samsung has published its official findings of why many of its Note 7 smartphones caught fire or exploded last year and it’s as most already thought, the batteries were to blame.

The findings were backed up by independent organisations, specifically UL, Exponent and TUV Rheinland. The three, third-party expert investigators came up with the same conclusion; batteries in the Note 7 devices were found to be at cause for the over-heating issues resulting in catastrophic failures in some cases.

Samsung tested more than 200,000 fully assembled devices and more than 30,000 batteries as part of its thorough research.

The findings have also prompted the company to invest heavily in new battery testing procedures, including an eight-point battery safety check for every unit used in a device.

“Our investigation, as well as the investigations completed by three independent industry organisations, concluded that the batteries were found to be the cause of the Note7 incidents,” said Samsung’s president of mobile communications.

“Nonetheless, we provided the target for the battery specifications for the innovative Note7, and we are taking responsibility for our failure to ultimately identify and verify the issues arising out of battery design and manufacturing process prior to the launch of the Note7.

“We have taken several corrective actions to ensure this never happens again, including the implementation of a multi-layer safety measures protocol at the product planning stage, and an eight-Point Battery Safety Check.

“We look forward to moving ahead with a renewed commitment to safety. The lessons of the past several months are now deeply reflected in our processes and in our culture.”

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The eight-point safety check consists of a durability test, visual inspection, x-ray, charfe and discharge test, a TVOC test, a disassembling test, accelerated usage test and what is called a Delta Open Circuit Voltage test.

Samsung

Samsung Galaxy S8 will not be unveiled at Mobile World Congress, battery testing to blame

The Samsung Galaxy S8 will not be unveiled at Mobile World Congress at the end of February. After months of speculation of will it, won’t it?, Samsung’s mobile president DJ Koh has given a clear indication that the phone will be subject to more testing to ensure it doesn’t follow the same ill-fated path as the Galaxy Note 7.

• Samsung Galaxy S8 and S8 edge: What’s the story so far?

Referring to the company’s report as to why the Note 7 suffered from battery issues, Koh said Samsung would be “working hard to regain consumer trust” and considering the results of months-long investigation have just been revealed, the company will likely want longer than a month to ensure the Galaxy S8 is safe.

We already knew that LG has muscled in on Samsung’s usual Unpacked event slot at Mobile World Congress in late February, so as for when the Galaxy S8 will actually be revealed is anyone’s guess at the moment. Several dates have been thrown up in the air, from late March to mid-April, all of which are plausible.

• Samsung Galaxy S8 release date: 26 February, 29 March, 15 April, 18 April, take your pick

Hopefully, the delayed Galaxy S8 will be worth the wait. Samsung’s 2017 flagship is expected to come with a near bezel-less display, no physical home button, instead opting for a fingerprint scanner embedded into the screen, and a dual-lens camera. 

Brain scans shed light on an extinct species

It’s not exactly easy to study the Tasmanian tiger. The marsupial has been extinct for over 80 years, and it wasn’t given much scientific attention when it was alive — settlers saw it as a threat to their livestock, not a curiosity. However, that isn’t about to stop scientists from learning more about the sadly neglected species. Researchers have scanned two preserved Tasmanian tiger brains and discovered that the creatures were considerably more intelligent than many thought. While their brains were similar to those of Tasmanian devils, their larger frontal lobes suggest they were better at planning and making decisions. That backs the belief that they were hunters, not scavengers like their genetic cousins.

The team accomplished the feat by using two different scanning methods. MRI scans helped analyze the brains’ gray matter, while diffusion tensor imaging looked at the white matter. Due to the sheer age of these particular tiger samples (over 100 years old), the scientists had to recreate the white matter by tracing specific tracts and generating virtual models.

There’s only so much the team can do with its knowledge when there are no living animals to save. It could help researchers understand other species that went extinct relatively recently, however. And even if the lessons learned here didn’t translate elsewhere, they paint a clearer historical picture. While there’s no doubt that colonists were cruel to the Tasmanian tiger, we now know that they also underestimated its abilities.

Via: New York Times

Source: PLOS One

Yahoo Under SEC Investigation for Not Disclosing Massive Data Breach Sooner

Yahoo is under investigation from the Securities and Exchange Commission over its failure to disclose its massive data breaches sooner, according to The Wall Street Journal.

In September 2016, the internet company revealed that an unidentified hacker had stolen the personal data of “at least” 500 million users. Then last month, the internet company admitted that over one billion Yahoo user accounts had been compromised in a hack dating back to August 2013. Information stolen included names, email addresses, phone numbers, birth dates, hashed passwords, security questions and answers.

According to today’s report, the SEC is investigating why Yahoo waited years before disclosing the massive data breach, despite the fact that some staff had known about the incident since at least 2014. The SEC has requested documents from Yahoo relating to the hacks in order to decide whether the internet giant could have reported the breach to investors sooner.

Yahoo is currently negotiating a takeover bid by Verizon, who is reportedly seeking a $1 billion discount off an original $4.8 billion buyout agreement because of the hacking revelations. It’s unclear what impact the SEC investigation will have on the deal, but Yahoo’s share price had already fallen following the news.

Tag: Yahoo
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Hugo Barra is leaving Xiaomi to return to Silicon Valley

Xiaomi’s global head Hugo Barra is leaving the company.

In a Facebook post, Xiaomi global VP Hugo Barra announced that he was leaving the company to return to Silicon Valley. Barra left Google in 2013 to head up Xiaomi’s global unit, and in the three years since, he was instrumental in Xiaomi’s growth overseas. The company is the third-largest smartphone manufacturer in India, crossing $1 billion in revenue last year, and has a foothold in key Asian markets, including Indonesia, Singapore, and Malaysia.

Barra mentioned that he will stay on in Beijing until February, following which he will take some time off before “embarking on a new adventure back in Silicon Valley.”

Commenting on the post, Xiaomi co-founder and president Bin Lin thanked Barra for his contributions, and said that Xiaomi’s current SVP Xiang Wang will lead the company’s global efforts:

When Hugo joined us 3.5 years ago, we started an amazing adventure to turn Xiaomi into a global player. We have come a long way since, and I couldn’t thank him enough for contributing so much to Xiaomi’s journey. As much as we would love to have Hugo stay with us in Beijing for a much longer time, we understand his personal challenges and wish him all the best in his future endeavors. I’m also looking forward to working closely with him in his new role as advisor to Xiaomi.

Xiang Wang, Xiaomi Senior Vice President, will lead our entire global efforts moving forward. We have ambitious expansion plans for 2017 and are confident in Xiang’s leadership to take our global business to even greater heights!

As the face of Xiaomi in India and other Asian markets, Barra’s enthusiasm and energy often carried the brand forward, and his absence will be sorely missed. That said, we’re excited to see what he’ll be working on next.

Hugo Barra leaves Xiaomi and will return to Silicon Valley

VP of International Hugo Barra announced on Facebook that he’ll be leaving Xiaomi and returning to Silicon Valley. Barra, who became a popular figure in the company both at home in Beijing and abroad, was a star at Google’s Android division prior to his tenure at Xiaomi. He called his time at the Chinese company “the greatest and most challenging adventure of my life,” and said he feels he’s leaving it in a “good place on its global expansion path. At the same time, he said that “living in such a singular environment has taken a huge toll on my life and started affecting my health.”

When Barra took the reins of Xiaomi in August 2013, it was a rapidly growing “rockstar” smartphone company, as he put it. To give you an idea of its trajectory during that period, it sold 7.5 million smartphones in 2012 and just two years later in 2014, 61 million. However, CEO Lei Jun recently admitted that such growth was too rapid and unsustainable. “In the first few years, we pushed ahead too fast. We created a miracle, but also drew on some long-term growth,” Lei said last week.

Despite its success in Asia, Europe and elsewhere, Xiaomi still doesn’t have a large presence in the US, other than selling its Mi Box online. However Barra recently told Engadget that the company has started testing phones, including a special version of the Mi5 and Mi Note 2 to assure that meet tough carrier and FCC standards stateside. So far, the only way to get a device has been to import one, and then it’s not guaranteed to work on US networks, especially LTE.

Barra played a big part in that success — he was omnipresent at Xiaomi events abroad and was a popular face of the product in China. He said that CEO Lei Jun has “been very supportive of my transition and has asked me to remain an advisor to Xiaomi indefinitely.” He didn’t elaborate on what he’d be doing next, but said he’d be “transitioning out of my role at Xiaomi in February after Chinese New Year,” then taking time off before “embarking on a new adventure back in Silicon Valley.”

Source: Hugo Barra (Facebook)

Dwarf planet Ceres’ surface isn’t what scientists expected

As much as we now know about Ceres, it’s evident the dwarf planet still has a few surprises left. Astronomers have discovered that Ceres’ surface isn’t as carbon-rich as previously thought. A fresh batch of infrared scans shows that the surface is likely “contaminated” by material (dry pyroxene dust) from asteroid impacts, mixing in with ‘wet’ dust, ice and carbonates. While Ceres has previously been lumped into the same composition class as nearby asteroids, it turns out that it merely looks like its neighbors — it’s a different beast altogether when you dive deeper.

The revelation casts doubt on earlier theories about Ceres’ origins, and suggests that it was formed at the outer edge of the Solar System before finding its way into the Asteroid Belt. That, in turn, sheds new light on both what asteroids are and how they’re formed. While they may look like simple rocks, their history can be surprisingly complex.

Source: NASA, Astronomical Journal

ASUS’ Raspberry Pi rival can play 4K video

Homebrew-friendly boards like the Raspberry Pi are great for do-it-yourself projects, but they seldom have the oomph needed to handle intensive tasks. That’s where ASUS hopes to do better — it quietly released its own device, the appropriately named Tinker Board. It’s almost the same size as the Pi, but its quad-core Rockchip processor has the power to play 4K video and 24-bit audio. This might be your ideal hardware if you’re building your own mini media center.

The board touts other perks you don’t usually see on these boards, including 2GB of RAM (twice as much as the Pi), gigabit Ethernet and the latest generation of SDIO for add-on boards.

ASUS’ hardware is not surprisingly more expensive than its rival at about £55 ($68). However, the bigger question is software. Like the Raspberry Pi, the Tinker Board runs on a variant of Debian Linux and supports Kodi for around-the-home media streaming. As Liliputing notes, though, ASUS doesn’t have the Pi’s years of developer support and fandom behind it — you can accomplish more, but you won’t have as much help getting started.

Via: Hexus, Liliputing

Source: CPC

The real reason(s) the Note 7 caught fire

The information is in, and we know why the Galaxy Note 7 caught on fire.

Samsung has announced the official results of its Galaxy Note 7 fire investigation and, as expected — since the recalls in September and October, respectively — the phone’s battery was to blame.

The company compiled 200,000 phones and 30,000 separate batteries, employing 700 people dedicated to the cause, and found that neither the phone’s fast charging feature, nor its waterproofing, had any correlation to the likelihood of conflagration. According to DJ Koh, Samsung’s president of mobile, the incidents were caused by the battery cell and no outlying piece of hardware and software. “We provided the target for the battery specifications for the innovative Note7, and we are taking responsibility for our failure to ultimately identify and verify the issues arising out of battery design and manufacturing process prior to the launch of the Note7,” he said in a statement to Android Central.

As reported last week, the batteries built by Samsung SDI, referred to as Battery A, had a defect in the top right of the lithium ion grouping, and in some cells, caused fire through repeated charge and discharge. The batteries from Amperex, the Hong Kong-based facility that built the batteries for the second group of Note 7s, referred to as Battery B, had a defect in the top left portion of the cell that caused short circuits in a small number of units. In addition, Samsung says some of these batteries didn’t have the necessary insulation to protect overheating from spreading to the rest of the battery in a short circuit scenario.

Through the investigation, Samsung worked with a number of independent organizations, including UL, Exponent, and TUV Rheinland, to build an eight-step battery safety check that will be implemented throughout the company’s manufacturing processes in the future in order to prevent any such problems from happening again.

Samsung Galaxy Note 7

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This is Samsung’s new 8-point battery safety check

Samsung has a new, um, battery of tests for its upcoming phones.

Now that Samsung’s Galaxy Note 7 fire investigation has concluded, the company is looking to the future, which means convincing customers that its upcoming phones are safe for everyday use.

To reassure the public, and to ensure that no future incidents crop up, Samsung has changed its phone-testing facilities around the world to include an eight-point battery safety check. While many of these checks are currently in use at existing plants, including visual and durability inspections and a process for ensuring that voltage leaks are not prevalent, the company is implementing four brand new tests, including the very uncommon and expensive task of X-raying all of its phones prior to shipping them to consumers.

Samsung believes that any and all of these four new tests, which will run across its entire phone lineup and not just its flagships, would have caught the manufacturing defects present in both sets of Galaxy Note 7 batteries. The company also plans to run what’s known as an “accelerated aging” test on its phones, which will simulate two weeks of real-world usage in just five days.

The fact that Samsung experienced such a broad series of battery misfortunes in a short period is both disconcerting and frustrating, but based on a survey Android Central performed in October, many customers feel comfortable putting the debacle behind them, and look forward to future Samsung devices.

Samsung Galaxy Note 7

• Galaxy Note 7 fires, recall and cancellation: Everything you need to know
• Survey results: Samsung users stay loyal after Note 7 recall
• Samsung Galaxy Note 7 review
• The latest Galaxy Note 7 news
• Join the Note 7 discussion in the forums!