As great as our gadgets can be, they also come with their own little inconveniences. Maybe the network signal cuts out just as you’re about to make an important call. Maybe the battery dies right before the good part of that movie you’re watching or book you’re reading. Maybe your smartphone catches fire in your pants.
While that last one may seem like a joke, it turns out it’s not. In fact, exploding phone stories are not so uncommon these days. Back in November there was the Australian couple whose iPhone began to smoke and glow on a flight to Sydney (shoddy repair work appeared to be the cause). Then there was the Galaxy S III in Ireland that caught fire and dripped molten plastic all over the inside of its owner’s car.
Now it seems to have happened again, and this time it was caught on video. According to the Finnish news site Kauppalehti (Google Translation), 17-year-old Henri Helmisen and his father were getting out of their car in a parking lot when Henri’s phone began to emit a massive cloud of smoke. He quickly dropped the phone and backed away. As it finished smoking, his father walked over and picked it up to inspect it. The incident was recorded by CCTV cameras in the area where they were parked:
Kauppalehti also got a picture of Henri’s iPhone after the incident. The phone is a bit of a mess, to put it mildly:
The phone was about three months old when this happened, and according to Helmisen it was working just fine right up until it started spewing thick smoke out of his pocket.
