The girl, according to Consumerist, was quite attached to her now-ruined Samsung Galaxy S4. She slept with it at her side the night of the incident, and she said it somehow got under her pillow while she slept. That’s when the smoldering began, and the girl woke when she smelled something burning.
The phone is now unrecognizable.
”The whole phone melted,” said the girl’s dad. “The plastic, the glass. You can’t even really tell that it was a phone.”
As it turns out, the phone burned not because of some inherent defect in the Galaxy phone, but because the family used a third-party battery. When the family contacted Samsung, the company told them that the phone’s user guide warns consumers against using third-party parts. Unsurprisingly, the family didn’t read that warning.
“If anything, they should put a big warning on it, like a cigarette label, if that’s the case,” the girl’s father said.
Samsung will be replacing the phone and the bedding.
While this incident resulted in no injuries, third-party parts have been destructive in the past. In July of 2013, a Chinese woman was electrocuted and died while using a third-party charger for her iPhone 5.
