It's hard to call two incidents of some occurrence around the world a trend, but, when those incidents both involve an electrical device catching fire spontaneously, it creates a situation that's hard to ignore -- especially when that device is the iPhone. On Saturday, Italian blogger Tim Colbourne was charging his 3G handset and, after three hours, it sparked and caught fire at the base. Tim did a little investigation and found a case of a Swedish handset doing the same thing back in 2008, making us a little concerned that there could be more melted chargers out there. Apple replaced that earlier phone after something of a fight, and while we're hoping they'll be a little friendlier here, we're also hoping this gives Cupertino another bit of incentive to go ahead and switch over to micro-USB already. All the cool kids are
doing it, and you don't see their cables catching fire --
usually.
[Via
Cult of Mac]
posted March 4th 2009 9:29AM
Looks more like someone used the connector as an ashtray than spontaneous combustion
My friend's iphone did this, it's a 3G one, she got it right when they came out in Canada.
Hahah :|
Shouldn't buy those cheap chiniese chargers... From the electrician point of view, i don't see how come it have melted so much with 110V??? Oh, sorry in Europe it's all about 220V, maybe apple should closely reconsider the difference in Voltage...
Even so, who the hell leaves their phone charging for 3 hours! My phone is in for an hour max and if it needs more (which usually isn't the case) I let it take a break. I am only worried about a full charge the first few times I charge a brand new electronic item. After the first few full charges I will always touch it to see it is it hot, I let it take a break and let it cool down, and that is with everything! Its common knowledge, ipod, iphone, Nintendo DS, anything and everything.
It's probably that pocket lint that gets built up and jammed in there that's catching on fire. Every few months I have to take a pin and scrape the port out because the lint causes the connector to sit in there unevenly.
Its a sad affair when your iPhone catches fire. What's even sadder is that in Japan, they have to give the phone away with a two year contract. According to Wired, the Japanese consider the iPhone outdated and featureless compared to what they can get over there.
This happened to my Play and Charge cable for the xbox 360. Microsoft took lengthy statements from me, having me ship them all components (including the xbox itself), and didn't ship the right stuff back (requiring another round of lengthy phone calls to get the right stuff sent back to me).
All I got for what could have been a much more dangerous situation, and the hours and hours of effort on my end to get it replaced was... one month of free xbox live. Sigh. A free controller or something would have been nice, considering I spent more time dealing with the problem than it would have taken to earn the money for more than one controller.
you can count 3 issue with the charger.
mine blowed up 3 mn after i charged my iphone the first time i got it. not even got time to use the fringing toy!
it cost me all the diplomacy, patience and courtesy to get that new iphone replaced.
the place i got it from did not even want to reimburse me!!!
as for apple, they replace it but it cost me hours on the phone explaining to them that if the charger blowed up, it might have damaged the phone.
talk about customer services...