This is probably happening more often than it should: A man was injured in South Korea this week when his Galaxy Note smartphone caught fire in his pants.
The culprit is apparently the Note's lithium-ion battery, which likely overheated and burst into flames.
According to the South Korean newspaper Chosun Ilbo, a 55-year-old man walked into Bupyeong fire station in the city of Incheon to report the incident. He suffered from second-degree burns on his right thigh, and the incident left him nursing a one-inch wound.
It's not exactly clear how the event happened. The Chosun Ilbo reported that the phone actually "exploded" in the man's pants, but the Associated Press said that officials wouldn't confirm that was actually the case. They also refused to identify the man involved.
For its part, a Samsung spokesperson acknowledged that the kinds of batteries found in the company's phone can burst into flames, but declined to say that's what happened here.
"Lithium ion batteries can catch fire due to external pressure or sudden changes in temperature, so we're trying to understand what really happened," he said.
Even so, the company said there's no investigation planned.
This isn't the first time a Samsung product has injured a person. Last spring, a student in the Korean city of Gwangju also suffered burns after his Galaxy S2 smartphone exploded in his pocket. Just a few months later, a Galaxy S3 allegedly exploded in a car in Ireland, though an investigation later proved the incident to be a hoax (the man had actually put the phone in a microwave).
Although lithium-ion batteries are used in a number of electronic devices, ranging from computers to phones to video game systems, they are known to overheat easily. In fact, that threat is the primary reason that test flights of Boeing's 787 Dreamliner planes were grounded, as concerns grew when a lithium-ion battery melted during one flight and another one burst into flames on a separate one.
Recently, however, the Federal Aviation Administration cleared the planes for further testing.
