Devices with batteries occasionally overheat, and batteries sometimes malfunction. This is a fact of life in the technology world, yet rarely are such incidents so apparent as in the case of a 51-year-old woman who’s iPhone 4 apparently began smoking just inches away from her head.
The woman, speaking to Mashable, recounted her frightening story:
The woman — who spoke on the condition that her name not be used — says she was traveling on the East Coast and sleeping alone in a hotel room with the phone plugged in to an Apple charger on the nightstand “12 to 14 inches from my head.”
About 6:30am, she awoke to to a strange smell and “sizzling” and “popping” noises. Then came “not quite an explosion, but an immense crackling,” as the room filled with smoke.
“It was an awful, putrid smell, almost like you were ingesting plastic of some kind,” she said in a phone interview.
She jumped from bed and used her laptop case to pick up the phone and throw it in the hotel room sink. The hotel smoke alarms failed to work, she said. An electrician found nothing wrong with the room’s power outlet.
Similar reports surfaced last year in both Australia and Brazil, as well as in the home of a Pennsylvania firefighter. Even so, it’s important to remember that such defects are extremely rare, and typically due to manufacturing issues with the battery itself rather than defects in Apple’s iPhone hardware.
Even so, it’s a pretty chilling experience to read accounts like these. Mashable has reached out to Apple, but the company has so far refrained from commenting on the matter.
