http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/17/technology/daily-report-samsung-compounds-its-smartphone-woes.html 2016-09-16 18:12:31 Daily Report: Samsung Compounds Its Smartphone Woes A recall has turned into a debacle for the South Korean phone giant, as Samsung has trouble executing its recall of phones that are prone to bursting into flames. === Samsung has a serious problem with things burning up, and not just in its smartphones. Time, market capitalization, and possibly long-term brand value are all in flames. The world’s largest maker of smartphones has, for some weeks, known about the unfortunate tendency of the battery in its Galaxy Note 7 phone to burst into flames. But as Su-Hyun Lee and Paul Mozur It wasn’t supposed to be this way. The company announced it would recall about 2.5 million phones over two weeks ago, about 10 days after the first reports of battery fires and explosions started appearing out of China. But some stores appeared to continue selling the phone after the recall was announced, and the company appears to have no good way of contacting affected customers, who may well be all over the world. Nor did the South Korean government aid Samsung, despite the importance of Samsung to South Korea’s economy and the country’s generally strong industrial policy. It’s not like the signals weren’t there. The United States flight authorities, along with those of many other nations, instructed people not to use their Galaxy 7 phones on airplanes. One of our reporters on a flight this week heard warnings about Samsung three times on a single flight. That kind of thing has got to hurt, beyond the loss of phone income. Samsung has lost $14 billion in market value since the recall began. According to Interbrand, Samsung had a It doesn’t help that YouTube is starting to see many videos purporting to show the phone exploding, in ways that look nothing like the damage seen earlier. Previously the phone appeared to be melting and cracking while charging, possibly because of impurities in the lithium ion material used in a battery, or poor management of overcharging. In the new videos, however, it explodes in a cloud of smoke — sometimes white, sometimes black. Batteries are often a headache for manufacturers. In 2014 Tesla had If anyone is benefiting from Samsung’s woes, it’s Apple, Samsung’s main smartphone rival. On Tuesday, Apple botched upgrades of its new smartphone operating system for a while — “bricking,” or rendering useless, phones that got the upgrade. That problem was corrected within a few hours, however, which made Apple look pretty swift in comparison to Samsung.