Samsung Galaxy Note 7 should have been an ultimate Android smartphone, sporting top of the line specs, phenomenal display, cool features and superb camera. Instead of breaking sales records, the device faced serious battery issues leading to Samsung recalling the phone, stopping sales and facing serious problems.
Although the Korean company promised to reveal the cause of defect to the public that didn’t happen. Instead, Instrumental did a teardown of the device, finding a potential cause of huge battery problems.
It seems engineers at Samsung didn’t leave enough internal space for the battery to expand when heated. This means that even replacing a battery on the Galaxy Note 7 with the one from a different manufacturer hasn’t solved the problem because the pocket where the battery sits simply didn’t have enough space. So, no matter what you did with the phone, the battery would cause problems at some moment, making the Galaxy Note 7 one very expensive unavoidable disaster.
If you look at the image, you’ll see that the CNC-machined pocket, made for the battery to sits in, left only 0.1 mm at the top, and 0.3 mm at the sides for the battery to expand while heated. In order for the battery to breathe as it should, the pocket should have at least 0.5 mm of breathing room, which designers left only at the bottom. So, in other words, engineers wanted to save a tiny bit of space, making the device more compact, which had disastrous consequences.
Of course, this doesn’t have to be the main cause for the battery problem, but until Samsung comes out with a public statement regarding the problem, this tiny (but in the end, huge) design flaw might be the main reason why Samsung Galaxy Note 7 ended as a huge flop.