Kyocera Resumes Phone Shipments, Says No Explosion Happened

from the hmmm... dept

Last week was the week of the "exploding mobile phone" as stories were coming out left and right about how one mobile phone after another was exploding. At the time, I found it interesting to compare the reactions of Kyocera and Nokia, the two headset makers whose phones were named in the stories. Kyocera stopped shipment of their phones and ordered a full investigation. Nokia just said that it must have been due to faulty batteries and it wasn't Nokia's problem at all. Well, the follow up to that story is that Kyocera has resumed shipments and said that "there was no explosion" in the first place. Instead, they say it was actually a safety feature, where the battery did overheat, but instead of exploding, expelled "harmless" graphite dust - which may have looked like an explosion. In some sense, this is (almost literally) the phone's way of letting off steam - and only happens in very rare instances. They say they're not concerned about the safety risks, and actually believe the battery performed as expected. While a blast of graphite dust certainly does sound better than exploding into flames, if there is a risk that my phone might suddenly spray out a blast of such dust, shouldn't that be explained to me at some point?