Samsung rises again

The Note 7 disaster threatened to burn Samsung's brand to the ground. How the company plans to renew itself with the Galaxy S8.

The explosion was never supposed to happen.

The Samsung smartphone battery, safely behind glass, began to smoke. In a few seconds it was engulfed in flames. A minute later the flames dissipated, leaving a black, smoldering mess.

"Does that one fail?" one journalist asked, as the Samsung workers, who were leading a rare tour of a smartphone factory and battery testing facility in Gumi, South Korea, tried to continue their rote explanations of the testing machines all around us. One of the machines conducts a compression test, pushing down on the battery with over a ton of force (13 kiloNewtons, to be precise). It was within this machine that the battery exploded.

"That would require additional testing to confirm that this is a defect," the translator told us.

"What testing would that be?" I asked.

The man in charge of the testing room, whose English was passable, interjected: "The decision is this is a fail. This lot has failed. Once the lot has failed, then all [of the] battery lot is shipped back to supplier." (A lot can be up to 15,000 batteries.)

A few minutes later, the translator gave us a more complete — but not final — explanation for the fire.

"It was actually to simulate what happens if the sample has a issue. The pressure given was over the limit that we usually test. This is not a routine test result. This was an overkill situation. If this happens during the routine incoming inspection test, we will immediately notify the vendor."

Wait. Samsung was punking a group of U.S. tech reporters? That didn't make sense. Why surprise us, inviting a slew of uncomfortable questions?

Hours later, a Samsung US rep gave us what sounded like the most likely story: The worker conducting the compression test was distracted by the presence of the tour in the room (which was relatively small). As a result, he had subjected the battery to much more pressure than normal, 20 kiloNewtons, or almost 4,500 pounds of force. That's what caused the battery to spontaneously combust.

In the long saga of the Note 7, it took Samsung months, not hours, to get to that final stage, but it did get there, detailing in January what went wrong with the phone in an announcement that didn't skimp on detail.

It’s a circuitous route, to be sure, but one Samsung might never have completed without the leadership of DJ Koh.

Samsung did a complete revamp of its user interface for the S8, redesigning TouchWiz's iconography, adding hints of color to the always-on display, and even softening the curves of the "squircles," the square-circle hybrids of the Samsung app icons. There are also a new Snapchat-like stickers and lenses built right into the camera app. The designers did everything short of putting the words "Millennial Edition" on the wallpaper.

"We did extensive research on the color palate as well as the shapes," explained Hyun Yeul Lee, vice president of Samsung's UX Design Group. "We tried to come up with a minimalized look and feel. The idea is that the light shines over the icon and you have a shadow on the bottom — that's why you have a break in the line. It's a 'line and light' concept."

And probably why the "B" in the Bixby logo looks so weird.