The cause of the Samsung Galaxy Note 7’s propensity to catch fire appears to have been found.

This morning an unnamed source who is not authorised to speak on the matter told Reuters that the battery was the reason the handset caught fire.

The source also said the South Korean firm is expected to release the findings of its investigation into the matter on 23rd January ahead of Samsung’s fourth-quarter earnings announcement.

This is not the first time that the battery has been fingered as the source of the fires.

Late last year hardware engineers at Instrumental conducted a teardown of the Galaxy Note 7 and found that there was a fundamental design flaw in the handset.

The engineers found that the space Samsung had allocated for the handset’s battery was tiny and that there was very little room given for the expansion of the battery. This resulted in the positive and negative poles within the battery touching and igniting in some instances.

Despite this disaster Samsung appears to be on track to report that Q4 of 2016 was its most profitable quarter since 2013. Despite the fiery handset that was recalled, replaced and then killed off strong demand for memory chips and OLED screens seem to have pushed Samsung’s earnings up.

[Via – Reuters] [Image – CC BY 2.0 Trevor Hurlbut]