Redditor says Galaxy S3 caught fire, burned his finger

[Jeffrey Chiu_081]

The person shares photos of the Galaxy S3, which is completely burned up. He claims he had made no modifications to the device.

 

http://news.cnet.com/8301-1035_3-57586371-94/redditor-says-galaxy-s3-caught-fire-burned-his-finger/

 

Images of the situation: http://imgur.com/a/9zxZK

 

very shocking and interesting at the sametime :)

[JordanMac]

long time since ive seen this sort of thing happening, my first gen ipod nano got recalled many years ago because a couple of them did this.

[Nicktrance]

I read this a few hours ago, some people are saying the reason is using a different charger but I don't know if that's what actually happened and either way the GSIII is not supposed to have these kind of problems considering it does use the micro USB standard.

 

Something similar happened a week or so after the SGS3 launch and after further investigation it was discovered that the user had microwaved his phone after getting it wet (*facepalm*, I know). I wouldn't be surprised if this is something similar.

 

I guess this is another reason why it's a bad idea to sleep with your phone right next to your head, especially if it's charging...

[Fonil]

Damn it why cant this sort of thing ever happen to me. If non hoax expect undisclosed settlement.

[Levent]

looks like power delivery short circuit well i owned an htc desire z and used it overclocked for 1.5 year (stock 800mhz but i ran it on 1.7ghz) the temps never got that high or caused phone to restart even when 3g is enabled and phone was at charge

[gjrud]

A small "update": he posted some pictures of the battery http://imgur.com/a/FxGzj

[Chevaishr]

well then :/

[Fonil]

Someone is about to be rich. 

[IdeaStormer]

Well from those images it looks like everything went well with the battery overheating. The battery didn't blow up, the phone didn't catch on fire other than the spark and he only got a small owie.

 

No way can he sue over that little owie. Samsung should grab this story and say how safe their phone is, it doesn't blow up, it only sparks when the bad battery from the bad battery manufacture goes bad. Samsung win, S3 owner maybe gets a new phone and his picture in the ad.

[That Norwegian Guy]

 Interesting. I hope spontaneous combustion isn't a trait shared by all Samsung products :P

[whatwid]

How could that happen? A fault during the charging would be my first guess. Wrong voltage or something like that?

 

I've never seen a S3 randomly catch fire, but some Iphones and early touch phones 

[arkon]

Not too surprised. My S3 gets uncomfortably hot sometimes too.

[RuecanOnRails]

Read the title and thought, "awe, does the poor little baby need a bandaid? lol"

 

To me it looks like it was purposely damaged based on the center of the burn and damage locations. It appears the most damage occurred at the outer edge on the backplate and not near any of the internal heat producing components. If you tear apart an S3 you will likely find that there isn't anything really under that burn location which could cause it to overheat to the point of exploding into flames. Not to mention hardware usually malfunctions and stops working before it bursts into flames from a 3.8v 2100mAh battery.

I would take the legitimacy of this with a grain of salt. 

[mgsstar]

Maybe he downloaded a virusy app that loads your cpu in the background and causing the overheat and catch on fire. Or the battery that he received was defective.