Inside Samsung's Rigorous Testing Lab Where The Infamous Galaxy Note7 Was Examined

By all rights, Samsung should be toast. Few companies can suffer the setbacks they've encountered without going under. They weren't always associated with faulty merchandise – not that long ago, they were a solid brand with every right to challenge for electronics supremacy. But in a cutthroat corporate world, made more so by an unforgiving and always-connected customer base, even the smallest flaws can snowball into full-blown nightmares. And Samsung's flaws weren't small. 

From the outside, however, it's fascinating to see how this huge company has weathered this storm and responded to their demanding customers. If they ever mean to restore their brand's good name, they'll need to combine a re-commitment to quality assurance with a PR onslaught and exercise a whole lot of patience. So it shouldn't be much of a surprise that they're trying to be transparent in the process. Step one: Figure out where it all went wrong.

Samsung's Galaxy Note7 will go down in history as one of the biggest corporate debacles of all time.

It doesn't get much worse than having your flagship, iPhone-challenging phone become a bomb in your customers' pockets. 

Turning that kind of faltering ship around would take a massive, and masterful, effort, starting with a huge recall campaign followed shortly by the sudden end of the production run.

Samsung had to figure out where it went wrong, which meant rigorous testing.

To find out the cause of the Note7 fires, Samsung built a cavernous, clinical torture chamber for cell phones.

Note the handy fire extinguishers at every rack, just in case they actually managed to replicate the problems their customers encountered.

Row upon row of phones were put through their paces.

They had more than 200,000 phones and more than 30,000 batteries to examine, with 700 researchers looking at the problem.

They used a battery (ahem) of tests on the phones, charging and discharging them, drilling into them, putting them under water, all to get to the bottom of the explosions.

So, what were their findings?

As expected, the explosions were traced to the batteries. 

Samsung used batteries from two different suppliers, and each of them had faults that could lead to the explosions.

One of the batteries had a small flaw in the positioning of the negative electrode tip in the upper right corner of the battery.

The battery's architecture doomed it to fail.

Researchers found that the other battery had an "abnormal weld spot" that could lead to a short circuit.

It seems unlikely that two separate batteries could both malfunction and cause fires, but three independent investigators verified Samsung's problems being with the batteries. 

Check out Samsung's explanation in the video below!