The tale of Samsung’s ill-fated Galaxy Note 7 flagship is perhaps one of the biggest scandals of the mobile world for 2016, and Samsung’s promised internal investigation report on how it all played, out and how they plan to prevent a repeat performance should reportedly be available to the public “very soon.” Tim Baxter, Samsung Electronics’ US leader, knew he was facing down an expectant crowd when he jumped up on stage at CES, so he immediately tackled the topic head on, assuring everybody present that Samsung was working hard to figure out exactly what happened with the Galaxy Note 7, whether it was poor quality control or bum battery chemistry, and how they can keep it from happening again. He went on to say that the company intended to make the report public, and it would come out “very soon”.
The promised report that he mentioned is the result of Samsung promising to the public and their shareholders that they would figure out exactly what had gone wrong with the Galaxy Note 7. Reports flew this way and that blaming various factors, and all the while, stubborn users continued dodging disabling updates, and Samsung phones all along the range kept on exploding, in some cases getting far more publicity than they may have otherwise, in the wake of the Galaxy Note 7 issues. To say that the Galaxy Note 7 brought quality control and device safety to the forefront of the public’s collective consciousness would be a pretty egregious understatement at this point.
The whole thing started off somewhat humbly, and quickly snowballed into a full-on crisis, complete with a PR train wreck. Soon after the Galaxy Note 7 dropped, reports began coming in that units had exploded. Thought to be a fluke, business continued as usual for a very short time. It didn’t take long for the sheer number of exploding Note 7 units to cause an uproar. Samsung ended up issuing a recall, which they did not handle entirely to proper protocols in some territories, and the phone was eventually banned on just about all airplanes everywhere, as well as many other public places and modes of public transit. While the number of Galaxy Note 7 units in the wild is still great, Samsung has mostly done all they can to get the units back in their own hands, and the publishing of the report is likely to mark the end of the saga, unless Samsung goes through with rumored plans to refurbish the handsets for safety and then resell them.