Another day, another exploding Samsung phone. Just a couple days after a Galaxy Note 7 exploded in the hands of a 6-year-old boy, a different Samsung smartphone met a similar fate in the hands of a teacher and mother of two. According to new reports, 30-year-old Sarah Crockett was in the middle of a busy cafe when she realized that her relatively new Samsung S7 Edge (she’d bought it three months before), began to “balloon in size.” Soon thereafter, it began emitting smoke, and melted into a useless pile.
As luck would have it, CCTV camera crews happened to be on site in the cafe in Witham, Essex, England, when the phone began to malfunction. “It suddenly just expanded in my hand and got really, really hot,” Crockett told The Sun. “I dropped it on the table. Within a few seconds there was smoke everywhere and I jumped out of the way. The whole thing was just barbecued.”
While the Galaxy Note 7 has been at the center of much of the controversy surrounding Samsung as of late, this isn’t the first incident involving the S7 Edge. In fact, there’s already litigation involving the South Korean smartphone maker and the Edge — back in May, an S7 owner was severely burned when his phone caught fire in his pocket, and subsequently exploded when he tried to remove it.
Crockett, in comparison, was much luckier, though she noted that she “lost all [her] photos.” All the same, she said, the situation could have been much worse. “What if it had been in [my son’s] hands? What if I had been driving?” Crockett has since sent the footage from CCTV to Samsung, and noted, “They said it must have been charging at the time and I told them it wasn’t — which seemed to surprise them as they said it was the first they’d heard anything like this.”
A Samsung spokesman has responded to the incident, stating, “There are no known safety issues with Galaxy S7 devices. This issue is currently being investigated and our customer services team is in contact with the customer regarding the matter.”
