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Samsung has been forced to discontinue one of its flagship phones – the Note7 – after a new wave of concerns over the device’s safety.
Serious questions have been raised after a series of reports claimed replacement devices were still catching fire despite the manufacturer saying it was confident it had corrected the safety risk.
During a global recall in September, Samsung blamed instances of fires and overheating in its first batch of handsets on manufacturing defects with the battery.
However, at least five reports have since emerged in the US of handsets that were issued after the recall catching fire.
The phones reportedly showed the green battery icon that Samsung had added to replacement phones to mark them as safe.
Two firms supply batteries to the mobile phones giant, but Samsung has not said which provider’s cells were at fault or clarified whose batteries are used in which Note7 smartphones.
Professor Harry Hoster, director of energy at Lancaster University, said: “When designing batteries, there is a trade-off between how long a battery will last between charges and how safe it is to actually operate. Samsung has possibly pushed too far in the direction of performance.
“It is genuinely difficult to estimate how much the risk of total battery failure may increase by in the pursuit of such performance, since these are rare events that only become countable once the batteries are in mass production – that is, when it is too late.”
However, reports into the second wave of safety issues raised the possibility that another dangerous fault lay away from the battery. Korean safety authorities said they had found a possible new product defect in the Note7 that may not be related to its batteries and urged consumers to stop using them.
One safety official said they were yet to determine when they would be able to identify what caused the new devices to catch fire.
Oh Yu-cheon, a senior official at the Korean Agency for Technology and Standards that oversees product recalls, said experts were still investigating the cause of the new defect.
He said: “The improved product does not have the same defect. That’s why we think there is a new defect.”
After first halting sales, Samsung said it has now “permanently discontinued” the device.
