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KDFW/YouTube screenshot by Chris Matyszczyk/CNET
If I am awoken by smoke in the middle of the night, I assume the neighbors are having a key party again.
However, one 13-year-old from Texas, says she was woken by a smoky smell and didn’t even worry about it. She went back to sleep.
For Ariel Tolfree, though, the smell didn’t go away. When she woke up again, she noticed that her Samsung Galaxy S4 was melting under her pillow.
As KDFW has it, Tolfree loves her S4. “It’s really, like nice and pretty and, it’s, like, high-tech,” she said.
Her dad believes the phone overheated, the battery swelled and that was the firestarter.
“We have a reasonable expectation that the products we buy are going to be safe,” he said.
For its part, Samsung insisted that it does make safe products. Indeed, it pointed out that this phone’s battery was a replacement, not an original Samsung battery.
Ariel Tolfree said that the phone slipped under her pillow during the night. Samsung explained that it has a warning that if you cover your phone with anything that prevents airflow this might, indeed, cause a fire.
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This is neither the first nor the last instance of a phone catching fire. Earlier this year, a Maine teen was burned when an iPhone smoldered in her pocket. There was even the claim a few years ago that a Motorola Droid 2 exploded in a man’s ear.
Keeping your phone far away from you at night is a first step. But there was an instance a couple of years ago when an iPhone 4 allegedly blew up while charging on a nightstand.
In Tolfree’s case, Samsung is examining the phone in an attempt to see what may have happened. The company is also replacing the phone and the bedclothes that were damaged.
Thankfully, no one was hurt.
