Don’t panic : despite the combustions of the Galaxy Note 7, the … – ZDNet France

Samsung has unveiled the results of its survey on the reasons for which its smartphone Galaxy Note 7 has started to explode shortly after launch, and the measures taken by the manufacturer to prevent such an accident.

All this is welcome, but these events must be put in perspective : batteries, ion lithium batteries used in smartphones, tablets, laptops and countless other devices shows a very high level of safety.

last year, some 1.5 billion smartphones have been sold in the world. Each of these devices contains a battery. And this figure does not include laptops, tablets, and other devices incorporating a battery (with the exception of hoverboards, which seemed to suffer from the same problem of precipitation at the origin of the sinking of the Note 7).

And yet, apart from the Galaxy Note 7 and some other problems are more minor and less dramatic, which have led to recalls, most of these devices had no problem and were completely safe.

In fact, the battery technology is already incredibly safe. And this is all the more surprising, seeing how people treat their devices, exposing them to large fluctuations in temperature, leaving them plugged in for long periods of time, using third-party chargers, and exposing the terminals to shocks and pressures, almost every day.

And in many ways, this fact makes the difficulties of the Galaxy Note 7 even more disturbing. Samsung has failed where other players – giants such as Apple products without a brand of portable batteries – seem to have no problem.

As someone who has been witness to several fires battery, some deliberate, others unintended, I have a healthy respect for all of this electric power that we carry in our pockets and our bags. I know too well what panic would now me if a battery was losing the pedals during my sleep or in the car on the highway.

Fortunately this does not happen often.

That said, the measures adopted by Samsung are welcome, and it is my hope that they are applied by all manufacturers of batteries (and taking into account the benefits that Samsung has had to face, I expect that other actors deploy the same security measures). As the finesse of the terminals increases and the tolerance of the battery is reduced, a better design becomes more and more important.