Flaming Cellphones

phorm writes "Many of us have heard the urban legend of cellphones causing fires at the gas pump, but how about the hazards of replacement batteries? Reuters is carrying a story about a woman whose cellphone burst into flame, causing her superficial burn injuries. According to Nokia, the problem has occured before, and is related to non-brand replacement batteries. For various reasons, these batteries may overheat and catch fire, or even explode! So far I haven't found much info on whether this has happened with other brands of phone, though I do know that my little flip-phone gets very hot when running in analog mode. Perhaps some slashdot readers have had a similar experience?"

Comments

They aren't kidding....

[cmowire]

I worked with some people who were simulating battery-powered electronics. The program had an error message of "Device is on fire". People would call up the tech support for the simulator and ask what the error message means (perhaps they thought it was like Guru Meditation errors or something equally geek-funny). It meant, literally, that the simulated battery is on fire.

The battery controller is in the phone, not the battery, so if it doesn't get the battery it expects to get, there's no limit to the pyromaniac fun that can be had. ;)

nokia falls for urban legends

[TerraFrost]

cellphones causing fires at the gas pumps may be an urban legend (if you click on the Helpful Links page of the TechTV, you can even read the snopes.com entry for it), but the user guide for the Nokia 3520 phone sure wouldn't have you believing that...

to quote from page 12...

Don't use the phone at a refueling point. Don't use near fuel or chemicals.

here's a pdf of the user guide:
http://www.nokia.ca/english/products/user_manuals/ 3520.pdf

Sounds suspiciously like FUD to me . . .

[mjprobst]

Oh, so this information just came from _somewhere_ and the replacement battery was from a _flea market_?

I could see this being true, but I could just as easily see it as a story planted by the phone manufacturer for one of two purposes:

• To keep selling official batteries at higher markup
  
• To hide the fact that there's some kind of heat management flaw in the company's product
  

Adobe cars with Fuel Cells

[BigBlockMopar]

Any practical electric car will use fuel cells anyway, so told who so?

And the fuel cells do what with fuel? Provide a large power supply with little internal resistance, as is required to run the large loads of electric motors to drive the wheels. What do *you* think will happen when the wires or bus bars between the fuel cells and anything else get crimped during a car accident?

Never mind that fuel cells run on combustible fuel which must be brought into close proximity to the soon-to-be-glowing-red-hot output terminals of the car accident fuel cell. At least in conventional cars, the only statistically significant source of fuel ignition is sparking from randomly bent metal scraping on asphalt. Of course, you'll still have that, too - unless your fuel cell car is an Adobe. (Old SNL reference, all you Gen-Y types won't get it.)

Of course, this means that fuel cells will actually be practical. Given the notorious sensitivity of their osmotic membranes the sort of fuel contamination which passes right through most filtration devices, I can't imagine that you'll be filling your car up off too many gas station tanks.