By Sam Kim, Mark Gurman, and Min Jeong Lee
When Samsung showed off its folding smartphone in San Francisco, engineers back in South Korea popped bottles of bubbly to celebrate the culmination of eight years of research. Two months and an aborted commercial release later, employees are scrambling to figure out what went wrong.
Samsung Electronics Co. on Tuesday scrapped what was to have been a crowning achievement, the launch of the world’s first mass-produced foldable smartphone. Instead of trumpeting its April 26 return to the forefront of global consumer electronics, the tech giant is now investigating how test versions of the $1,980 Galaxy Fold developed problems — including screen failures — after mere days of use.
The about-face allows Samsung to avoid another fiasco like the Note 7 in 2016, when smartphones that had already found their way into consumers’ hands showed a tendency to burst into flames. But the Fold episode shows similar tendencies to rush ahead with new technologies to satisfy corporate goals in spite of engineering risks. Even inside Samsung, employees have to wonder how they so quickly got so close to another debacle.
The Note 7 episode triggered a global recall, cost the company billions of dollars and marred its reputation as it…
