Phandroid
Another Samsung Galaxy S4 catches fire, can we stop putting cheap 3rd party accessories in these things?
Samsung is making local headlines again, not because of record breaking sales or some fancy new hardware feature. It seems another one of Samsung’s Galaxy smartphones spontaneously combusted, leaving behind a puddle of ash and soot that nobody would guess was ever a smartphone. A Denton County news station tells the story of exactly what went wrong, pointing to — what else — but a faulty 3rd party accessory as the likely culprit.
While charging her Samsung Galaxy S4, a 13 year old Texas teen woke to the smell of smoke after her phone began to catch fire while charging under her pillow — a popular place for youngsters to stash away their cellphone after late night texting sessions and one of the worst places to store a smartphone while electricity is pumping through its circuitry. Where that alone isn’t likely to cause just any household smartphone to explode (although it could cause a device to reach dangerously high temperatures), the combination of heat and a 3rd party battery in the phone caused the nearly all-plastic phone to light on fire.
As Samsung, or any other manufacturer will tell you, cheap 3rd party accessories like chargers or batteries are never guaranteed to work properly with a device and in some cases, can malfunction. We’ve seen countless headlines of exploding phones, some even resulting in death, simply because consumers were looking for a deal or are ignorant to the safety concerns.
While the teen’s father is subtly placing the blame on Samsung who he feels — despite warning users in the user manual about restricting airflow on charging devices — should put bigger warnings labels on devices if they have the potential to catch fire, likening it to warnings found on cigarettes.
Of course, Samsung assures us their products are safe, but admits greater education on the subject is probably needed to avoid further instances like this in the future. Still, despite the hardware failure not appearing to be any fault of their own, Good-Guy Samsung will be replacing both the teen’s smartphone and bedding (pillow, mattress and all) while they investigate the matter.
All that being said, isn’t it about we, as a people, can finally move past this? How many countless smartphones have to die before we learn cheap 3rd party accessories are the last thing we need to be sticking inside our $700 smartphones? Of course, for those times when it does appear to be actual hardware failure, HTC will be more than happy to help steal another customers for Team HTC.
[FOX 4]
LG launches new Android tablet/netbook hybrid with 4GB of RAM, 128GB SSD and an Intel Core i5
Add one more to the list of ridiculous Android tablets. LG has revealed a variant of their Tab Book, a netbook/tablet hybrid that folds down into a tablet while you’re on the go and slides up to be a netbook when you need some hardcore typing action. This variant has the model number 11TA740, and shares the same specs as the Windows 8.1 version that came before it. Here’s what’s under the hood:
- Size: 11.6 inches
- Resolution: Full HD (1920 × 1080)
- Size / Thickness: (mm) 286 x 192 / 16.7
- Weight: (kg) 1.05
- CPU: 4th generation Core i5 4200U (Turbo 2.6GHz, Cache 3MB)
- Memory: 4GB (1 slot)
- Graphics: Intel HD Graphics 4400
- Storage: SSD 128GB
- USB / HDMI: USB 3.0 (2 pc) / standard HDMI
- Card slot: MicroSD
- Color: Snow White
- OS: Android 4.2.2 (Jelly Bean)
Ridiculous, no? The only thing concerning on that list is Android 4.2.2 Jelly Bean — you ought to get with the times, LG. Everything else looks absolutely nice, though, and we imagine you won’t find a device as powerful as this coming out of many other OEMs’ research and development offices.
Unfortunately LG’s press release (translated from Korea to English using the not-so-perfect Google Translate) doesn’t mention anything about pricing and availability, though we’ll certainly be hitting up our folks at LG to see if they have anything more to share. In the meantime grab a towel to catch all that saliva drooling out of your mouth and let us know if you’d be in for one should it ever make its way to your territory.
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