I know the appeal of buying off-brand batteries for your cell phone or laptop. However, there is often a reason the off-brands are less expensive, and sadly sometimes the generics can be very unstable and cause real serious problems when they fail.
A man has died in China after his mobile phone battery exploded in his chest pocket.
Welder Xiao Jinpeng was working at the Yingpan Iron Ore Dressing Plant in the western province of Gansu.
. . .
He died at a nearby hospital after emergency treatment failed.
Motorola said it was “highly unlikely” that one of the company’s products was to blame – and suggested the dead man might have been using a fake phone or battery.
So the new rule for buying generics is that while you might be OK buying generic/refilled ink-jet cartridges, you probably don’t want to buy off-brand batteries. Admittedly, even the name brand batteries have problems at times, but I believe they still have much lower failure rates. While we don’t know that this man was using a generic battery, I’m willing to go out on a limb and guess it wasn’t a genuine Motorola.
[tags]Exploding cell battery kills man, Dangerous battery, Generic batteries[/tags]
That’s happened to folks in the US of A, too — I think you’ll find some if you spend some time Googling.
The name for the phenomenon is cool: “thermal runaway.” Captures the essence pretty well, I think. 🙂