It was just a few months ago that the Galaxy Note 7 was touted as one of the best Android flagships of the year, but Samsung’s latest phablet just wasn’t meant to be. Not long after the phone hit the market in September, reports of it overheating and catching fire started emerging all over the world, which prompted Samsung to recall all units and investigate these incidents. While that turn of events was obviously less than ideal, it wasn’t unprecedented. However, what followed it certainly was. Namely, after the South Korean tech giant announced that it had eliminated the battery defect during an internal investigation of the matter, the largest phone maker in the world promptly returned the Galaxy Note 7 to the market. Unfortunately, the replacement, “safe” units of Samsung’s latest phablet proved to be just as dangerous as their predecessors, and the company was forced to issue an unprecedented second recall of the device and permanently discontinue the Galaxy Note 7 production in early October.
According to most estimates, the Seoul-based smartphone manufacturer is set to lose around $3 billion due to this entire ordeal. Ever since the Galaxy Note 7 met its untimely end, Samsung has been pouring a whole lot of resources into another internal investigation of its overheating-related issues, supported by numerous government agencies and independent research institutes from all over the world. Six weeks later, it seems that the company still isn’t sure what exactly went wrong with the Galaxy Note 7 because if it was, it isn’t likely that there would be any hesitation to make these findings public.
And that brings us to today. As reported by several Korean media outlets, Samsung is currently doing everything it can to finalize its internal investigation into the matter and go public with its results by the end of the year. Not surprisingly, the company’s insistence on putting this unfortunate episode to bed by the end of the year is directly connected to the upcoming Galaxy S8. In other words, Samsung wants to reassure consumers that its next flagship will be perfectly safe, and the best way to do that is by giving them a detailed explanation of what went wrong last time and what was done to avoid that issue in the future. After all, if the Seoul-based tech giant can’t figure out the reason behind the Galaxy Note 7 fiasco, how can it even claim that the same mistake wasn’t made with the Galaxy S8?