Reliance Jio LYF

After Samsung, now Reliance Jio’s Lyf smartphone has allegedly caught fire leading to a ‘narrow escape’, said Twitter user Tanvir Sadiq. Lyf responded to the user asking for more details and said it is investigating the matter and will get back with further details.

Note that the user has failed to provide further information like the model name of the phone or if it was charging when it exploded. It’s quite impossible to decipher in the picture which model the phone is due to how mangled it is. A report by GizBot seems to imply some precedence in the matter, it had reported last month that a Lyf Water 1 smartphone had exploded causing injury to the user’s hand.

Note that smartphone explosions are almost always caused by exploding batteries, and that certainly looks to be the case here given the picture of the back of the phone. The Verge did a comprehensive piece on why smartphone batteries explode, citing scientist Lynden Archer, “There’s been a bit of an arms race where every manufacturer of a smartphone wants to get the highest battery life, this trend in the field is producing more and more of a tendency for overcharging so all these models of failure are becoming more commonplace.”

However, the problem with Lyf smartphones doesn’t seem commonplace enough yet to warrant a recall, although if the number of such events rise, the company will be forced to do something about it. This will not be good news for Reliance Jio, which has been providing the Lyf smartphones with its Jio SIM-cards. In June, LYF smartphones accounted for 13% of LTE smartphones shipments. It’s worth noting that the recall of the Note 7 has caused Samsung a loss of ~$4.5 billion.

Also read: Samsung suspends Galaxy Note 7 production