Three-month-old iPhone bursts into flames

Recently, there has been a lot of news about gadgets overheating, and in some extreme cases, even exploding. And the latest in the ever increasing line-up of gadgets exploding is an iPhone owned by a 17-year-old Finn named Henri Helminen. This report comes from 9to5Mac, who have sourced the information from Finnish publication SK24.

The report states: “A 17-year-old Finn named Henri Helminen was carrying his iPhone in his back pocket (stick with us here) when it spontaneously started smoking in a big way. We all know Lithium batteries can— if something is wrong— explode or behave like in the video. But, usually there has to be some major malfunction.” Luckily, Helminen suffered no serious injury owing to the explosion.

The burnt state of the iPhone

There is also a video of the event happening as it was captured on CCTV. A report goes on to state, “This is a little too close to Nokia’s headquarters for us to believe off the bat. We will continue to follow the story to see what has happened.”

A similar incident occurred in Ireland a few days ago where a man’s new Samsung Galaxy S III exploded while in the car mount. Explaining the situation, he stated, “I pulled in to look at my phone; the phone burned from the inside out. Burned through the plastic and melted my case to the phone. The phone kept working but without any signal. I brought it to the carphone warehouse and they told me that they couldn’t replace it for me, that they had to send it off to be checked out first. (With) No replacement phone, (I was) left with nothing. The phone was destroyed and it slightly burned a piece of plastic on the inside of my car.”

He went on to add that the store he purchased it from refused to provide him with a replacement and that the phone needed to be sent to Samsung. Since the store did not provide him with a replacement handset, Samsung contacted him and provided him with a replacement Galaxy S III and told him that they would send him some free stuff as well. However, the company did not confirm if it was a fault of the smartphone. Samsung later on issued a statement: “Samsung is aware of this issue and will begin investigating as soon as we receive the specific product in question. Once the investigation is complete, we will be able to provide further details on the situation. We are committed to providing our customers with the safest products possible and are looking at this seriously.”

As of now, we do not know the authenticity of this video or if it indeed could be a trick by one of Apple’s rivals. Hopefully, we will get to know more as the story unfolds.

Share your thoughts on the recent cases of exploding handsets in the comments below.