The South Korean government also launched an investigation into the Galaxy Note 7 fires after Samsung discontinued the handset last year and said that it would conduct a thorough investigation into the matter. Samsung released the report of its Galaxy Note 7 investigation a couple of weeks back and explained that the battery was the culprit. The state-run Korean Agency for Technology and Standards has reached the same conclusion.
The country's Ministry of Trade, Industry and Energy said in a press release today that the tests revealed that some electrodes of batteries installed in the Galaxy Note 7 were damaged while some batteries didn't have proper insulation materials. The ministry did mention that no problems in the Galaxy Note 7's hardware design or software were discovered.
“As the pace of smartphone development has been rapid for years, the capacity of batteries has been expanded as well,” said Kim Jeong-hoi, director general of the product safety policy bureau at the ministry, adding that companies “should have focused more on safety issues in their manufacturing process.”
The South Korean government has said that it's now going to tighten safety guidelines on lithium-ion batteries and smartphones to ensure that the chances of something like this happening again remain slim.
