[Note 7 Guides, News, & Discussion] br0adband:
I sortakinda has an epiphany a few minutes ago and realized something that I haven't seen anyone else mention or discuss so I'm going to mention it here. I know I'll probably get flamed for this but I can't control the actions of other people and their motivations for being who they are so whatever.

Consider the concept of Cause & Effect, if you will:

- Samsung released the Note 7 with the original battery made by SDI on August 19th

- starting on August 24th Samsung started getting reports about incidents with the Note 7 burning up/catching on fire/exploding/etc

- Samsung gets some of those damaged units returned to them (the very first incident happened in South Korea but there were others in the country within days of that first one), does some testing, comes to a conclusion that perhaps the construction of those batteries is at fault (if you've seen the X-ray pics of the SDI battery you can readily see the anode-cathode plates get bent in some devices and almost touch which could be just enough to cause a battery to fail) and that battery itself is the probable cause of the Note 7 failures

- Samsung gets another battery manufacturer, ATL, to make batteries based on the Note 7 spec requirements and they provide Samsung with them and then Samsung does some internal testing which shows that after being installed in a Note 7 they do not suffer from the same plate bending the SDI batteries exhibited and are considered to "a safe fix" to the best of their knowledge. Samsung begins manufacturing the Note 7 v2 with the ATL battery and stops use of the SDI batteries

- Samsung announces on September 13th that a firmware update will be rolled out worldwide for the original production models of the Note 7 on September 20th that will do two things:

--- The update will alter the color of the battery icon from white to green - they actually had to go and ask Google for permission to do that because it violates Android guidelines and Google granted the permission. The reason for the green icon was to make it immediately apparent when looking at the lock screen or the home screen that a given Note 7 had the update applied

--- The update altered the battery charging cap to 60% meaning that regardless of whether or not you used a typical "slow" charger or you used the factory fast charging capable charger the battery in the Note 7 would never exceed a 60% charge. The reason for this was they concluded that charging the battery over the 60% point could be causing some type of overheating issue that they were unclear about which caused the battery to fail and result in an incident where the device destroys itself. Understand that the firmware is altering the charging circuit controller inside the Note 7 - it is not altering the battery cell in any respect - the change takes place inside the Note 7 entirely

- Samsung announces a worldwide recall - the 1st one, on September 15 2016 - and asks for people to return their Note 7 devices for exchange with a replacement Note 7 aka the v2 model that would have 2 things different from the original release model:

--- it would have the new battery manufactured by ATL and would not have the potential "crushing" issue the SDI batteries were shown to be susceptible to by the X-ray examinations

--- it would also have that firmware update in place from the factory which changed the battery icon to green and limit the battery charge to 60% capacity

- after September 20th Samsung gets reports of incidents involving original devices that hadn't been returned as part of the 1st recall but were running the firmware update released on September 20th to change the battery icon and limit the battery to 60%

- at some point after September 20th and before October 13th - the date when they initiated the 2nd recall worldwide for regardless of the date of manufacture - Samsung received more reports of incidents that involved replacement Note 7 devices that had not only the new battery but also the firmware update as they were shipped from the factory

See where I'm going with this?

Even with the 2nd devices aka Note 7 v2 that was using the ATL battery and had the firmware update in place to change the icon and limit the charge capacity they still failed.

Folks, I'm pretty confident in saying "It ain't the battery causing this..." - it absolutely appears to be the effect of the defect and failure that's happening, but not the cause itself. The batteries changed, the firmware changed, and yet the failures continue(d) to happen and will do so as long as they're still in use.

Now it remains to be seen what Samsung discovers in their investigation.