A French mother of three said her Samsung (SSNLF) Galaxy J5 smartphone on Sunday swelled up, began smoking, caught fire, and then exploded, the Associated Pressreports.
“I panicked when I saw the smoke and I had the reflex to throw it away,” Lamya Bouyirdane, who lives in Pau, southwest France, told the AP the following day. Her 4-year-old son had reportedly been holding the phone.
The report of an exploding Galaxy J5 comes in the wake of Samsung’s global recall of its troubled Galaxy Note 7, which was prone to overheating and exploding, and the South Korean tech giant ultimately scrapped.
It also follows an earlier claim in October that a U.S. Smartphone owner’s 2-week-old Samsung Galaxy S7 Edge—received in exchange for the Note 7—exploded after normal use. “Samsung might have another exploding smartphone,” Coins2Day’s Don Reisinger reported.
Does this mean that Samsung will be putting out fires across its entire product range? Not necessarily.
Samsung said in a statement that it was unable to comment on the case in France until it had obtained and examined the device. But it assured its customers the “issues with the Galaxy Note 7 are isolated to only that model.”
William Stofega, a mobile phone expert at market research firm IDC, told the AP that this was the first report of a battery fire he’d heard of related to the J5—which has been on the market for several months—and most likely an isolated incident.
“These reports tend to cluster,” he added.
Lithium-ion batteries, which are used in most laptops and smartphones, are occasionally susceptible to overheating and catching fire.