#exploding phones

Intel is being sued by Brazilian smartphone and device manufacturer Qbex, over allegations that the company deliberately sold faulty SoFIA smartphone SoCs and failed to fix them within a reasonable period of time.

The post Intel Sued for Allegedly Defective, Exploding Phones appeared first on ExtremeTech.

Energy can be stored in a variety of ways. When you pull back on a slingshot, energy from your muscles is stored in its elastic bands. When you wind up a toy, energy gets stored in its spring. Water held behind a dam is, in a sense, stored energy. As that water flows downhill, it can power a water wheel. Or, it can move through a turbine to generate electricity.

When it comes to circuits and electronic devices, energy is typically stored in one of two places. The first, a battery, stores energy in chemicals. Capacitors  are a less common (and probably less familiar) alternative. They store energy in an electric field .

In either case, the stored energy creates an electric potential. (One common name for that potential is voltage.) Electric potential, as the name might suggest, can drive a flow of electrons. Such a flow is called an electric current. That current can be used to power electrical components within a circuit.

Photo courtesy FreeImages.com/Simon Hilton.

Most Galaxy Note 7 owners have by now returned their handsets to Samsung in the massive recall, but the numbers are still not at 100%. Maybe you love your Note 7 so much you can’t imagine giving it up. You’ve never noticed it getting hot during charging and it still works fine, so why bother?

If you’re among the last diehard Note 7 lovers, Samsung is about to force you to hand it over.

Starting next week, Samsung will be pushing an update to the remaining Note 7s that will stop all wireless communication to and from the device, and will also prevent the smartphone from charging entirely. Once a Note 7 gets the update, it will be impossible to continue to use it as a phone, or even to charge it, so within a few hours all remaining Note 7s will be so many very fancy paperweights.

There’s been a ton of speculation about the cause of the Note 7 battery fires, although we’re still waiting on the official explanation from Samsung about the cause. Certainly, only a small percentage of phones ever actually caught fire, but Samsung has been extremely aggressive with their recall, even going as far as halting production of the model entirely. It seems like they’re not taking any chances when it comes to leaving remaining Note 7s in the wild.

Based on the timing of the update and Samsung’s statement that they’ll announce the cause of the problem by the end of 2016, it’s quite possible that Samsung is planning both these moves for the same time, or perhaps they want to scoop up the last of the flawed phones before letting us know what the issue was.

Either way, if you’ve been refusing to hand in your Note 7, you have a last week with it before you’ll finally have to say goodbye. Check out the full article on Phandroid to see when the final update is coming.

But Samsung is doing what they can to ease the transition with generous credits, especially if you’re willing to exchange your Note 7 for another Galaxy model, so it shouldn’t be too painful. Have you kept your Note 7 all this time? Tell us what you’ll be replacing it with.

Photo by Fred Bchx / CC BY 2.0 / Cropped from original 

The problems with Samsung’s Galaxy Note 7, and more recently the S7, have been the subject of a whole lot of speculation this year, but it’s not clear that even when Samsung took the almost unheard of step of fully recalling the Note 7 and dropping it from their lineup that they had even managed to identify the cause of the problem—especially after their “safe” replacement phones caught fire as well.

But now things have changed. The Korea Herald has reported that Samsung will be pulling back the curtain to explain what caused the disastrous issues with the Note 7, and the announcement should arrive before the end of this year.

Letting customers know the cause of the issue will be a smart move for Samsung: it signals that they know what went wrong and also how to prevent it from happening again. And coming out with the news now will be crucial if they want to entice consumers, some of whom may have had to return their eagerly anticipated Galaxy Note 7s this year, to take a chance on their new models, starting with the Galaxy S8.

Check out what we know so far on AndroidPIT, and keep visiting the Liquidum Blog right here for updates.

Were you affected by the Note 7 recall? Has it influenced you to avoid Samsung phones in future?

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you know that Samsung has been having a rough couple of months. After trying to fix the faulty batteries that were causing the Galaxy Note 7 to spontaneously catch fire, Samsung had to pull the plug on the Note 7 entirely when even the supposedly safe replacement phones began catching fire.

The batteries in the Note 7—and pretty much every other smartphone—are lithium-ion batteries, which include a liquid-based electrolyte. Although most smartphones don’t have the exploding phone problem, the electrolytes in lithium-ion batteries are flammable, and if there’s a defect in the battery design, like in the Note 7, it can cause fires.

As we’ve seen already, Samsung has scrapped the faulty Note 7 and gone back to the drawing board to look for a better option. It turns out, though, that a safer battery technology already exists: solid-state batteries.

Unlike lithium-ion batteries, solid-state batteries (as you can probably guess from the name) don’t contain a liquid, and their components are much safer—either a lot less flammable, or not flammable at all. That’s one reason they’re used in devices like pacemakers, which need to be as safe as humanly possible. There’s another bonus to solid-state batteries, too: they have longer life cycles, meaning more charges before the battery starts to wear out.

So why don’t smartphone manufacturers just make the switch? Money. Solid-state battery tech is extremely expensive right now; a battery big enough to power your smartphone could cost thousands of dollars.

But if smartphone manufacturers adopt solid-state battery technology, as production scales up, prices are likely to go down. And the time might be right for a company like Samsung to make the switch.

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