Samsung’s fiasco with its fire-prone Note 7 phone has pushed its rival LG to take additional precautions with its next smartphone. Samsung recalled millions of Note 7 phones after dozens overheated and caught on fire. Samsung blamed numerous problems with its batteries and announced tighter quality controls and more rigorous testing.
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LG said it’s doubling the separation between the battery’s positive and negative chambers to reduce the risk of a short. Samsung’s investigators found that overly thin separators were partly to blame for the Note 7 problems.
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LG also redesigned the phone’s interior to separate the two main sources of heat — the main processor and the display driver — and turned other components into heat sinks to dissipate heat.
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We started by placing these two (sources) as far apart as possible and then built the phone around it, LG spokesman Frank Lee said.
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Even though the company hasn’t had the types of failures that Samsung experienced with the Note 7 batteries, Lee said wireless carriers are seeking greater safety assurances for all phones they sell.
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What’s important for them is to make sure that they present to their subscribers a quality, stable product, Lee said in an interview. This caught the entire market off-guard.
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LG unveiled its next phone, the G6 [pictured above], ahead of Monday’s opening of the Mobile World Congress [MWC 2017} wireless show in Barcelona, Spain. Samsung has said it’s delaying its next major phone, the Galaxy S8, until after the show.
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LG has a tiny share of a worldwide smartphone market dominated by Apple and Samsung. LG didn’t gain significantly following the Note 7 recall.
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The G6 will have a 5.7-inch screen, though the size of the phone itself is about the same as last year’s 5.3-inch G5. LG achieves this partly by adopting an 18:9 aspect ratio, meaning the display’s height is…