Samsung Galaxy S4 burns man’s house down

BY Stefan Constantinescu

Published 29 Jul 2013

First their was a girl in Switzerland who burned her entire leg when her Samsung Galaxy S III exploded in her pocket at work. Then there was that guy in the United Arab Emirates who woke up at night due to a terrible burning smell coming from his Galaxy S4. Well, it’s about to get a whole lot worse. According to two publications, ChinaNews and LiveDoor (via RBMen), a man in Hong Kong just lost his house because of a Galaxy S4.

The story, as best as I can understand from Google Translate, is that a 47 year old man in Hong Kong was sitting on his sofa after dinner, fiddling around on his mobile phone, when all of a sudden it shot out some sparks. He freaked out and threw the phone to his side, where it then exploded and then took the couch with it. The couch must’ve been made out of a highly combustable material (polyester?) because as soon as it went up in flames, he had to abandon the house.

So who is to blame? Samsung has to investigate, obviously, but this could be anything. He could have been using a third party charger, a third party battery, or worse yet, he could have had legitimate Samsung components, but they were just plain faulty.

Expect to hear more about this as time goes on.