Over the years there’ve been plenty of stories here and there about smartphones catching on fire, spontaneously melting or outright exploding. There’s often little in the way of proof, but a new video, apparently caught on CCTV in Finland, shows exactly that. And it’s terrifying.
The video in question shows iPhone owner Henri Helminen as he leaves work, and the iPhone is a 90-day old iPhone 4S. Helminen can clearly be seen walking across a courtyard, at which point his pocket starts to smoke up like a round of firecrackers.
Exploding Droid 2 ends in stitches
Wondering first whether it was his cigarette lighter that had broken, Helminen’s basic ‘flip the hell out’ instinct soon triggered, letting him perform enough of a dance to rid his pocket of the offending fireball without suffering from third degree burns.
Now, for as long as we’ve had phones pumping data into our trousers we’ve had reports of these kind of problems, so it’s perfectly feasible that this all played out exactly as you can see on screen:
But, as 9to5Mac rightly points out, there’s always the chance of this being a PR stunt from a rival.
The fact that it’s in Finland means the obvious choice there would be Nokia, but we’ve done a bit of digging and there’s nothing online to suggest that Helminen is either a Nokia employee or an actor, while Kaarina, where he lives, is a good 90 miles from Nokia HQ.
What do you think? Let us know in the comments section below.
