There are some things that you just can’t bite, nibble, or chew. Smartphone batteries are one of them, and a Chinese just found that out the hard way as the battery simply exploded in the face.
The incident happened at an electronics store at an unspecified location in China. The man perhaps wanted to make sure the iPhone battery he is buying is genuine. However, there sure will be differences on the method to be employed to find out the genuineness of a lithium-ion battery. That is because biting has proven to be the most foolish way of doing it.
Details aren’t available but it seems the act of biting could have sheared off the top insulating layer. Further, the saliva could have led to short-circuiting of the cell leading to a spontaneous combustion.
Fortunately, none seems to have been hurt grievously, including the man himself. That again can be explained from the fact that the combustion actually happened slightly away from the man’s face, and not literally in his face. Perhaps there was a noise or something that provided him with an inkling of what’s going to happen, and he had discarded the battery just in time for the combustion to happen just clear of his face.
There was also a woman standing nearby along with the person manning the store, and the burning battery landed clear of them all. All manufacturers warn against physically tampering with batteries as this could lead to fire and maybe they should warn against biting as well from now onwards.
Interestingly, this comes at a time when Apple is under fire for intentionally throttling CPU performance to give precedence to battery life, besides preventing sudden shut downs as well. However, owners are up in arms against the company for keeping them in the dark while their iPhone performance was muted via iOS update 10.2.1.
Apple has since taken a number of reconciliatory steps like reducing the cost of replacement batteries, tendering an apology and such. However, none has prevented from users dragging the company to court as many accused this to be a tacit ploy on part of Apple to actually force buyers to upgrade to newer iPhone models.
Footage of the video went viral in the Chinese video sharing site Miaopai.
