No, it's not a new feature to help fend off Finnish winters. Today
Nokia issued an advisory that its most popular battery could overheat and cause some, er, issues. Though actual incidences of trouble are low, it is offering to replace the 46 million offending batteries.Apparently the problem has been limited to just 100 actual reports of trouble (that's a failure rate in the neighborhood of 0.00000something%). But even those reports state that there was no serious injury or property damage as a result of the overheating. So if no one got hurt, and no one's phone went up in flames, then what's the real problem here? Are people just mad about their hot phones? Are they really
that hot? I had a laptop singe the hair off my legs once (OK, not really singe. More like melt), but I didn't call up the manufacturer to complain about it. Should I have?
At least this issue isn't as drastic as the one suffered by Sony last year. It recalled almost 10 million laptop batteries after laptops overheated and burst into flame. I saw some pictures. They weren't pretty. Melted laptop is a sad, sad sight.
According to the Reuters reports, the Nokia batteries at stake were actually made by Matsushita, which is the parent company of Panasonic. Matsushita has admitted that there was a problem with the manufacturing process and not the design of the battery. So the egg should really be on Matsushita's face, and not Nokia's. Alas, things don't always work out that way. Nokia's stock sank nearly 1% on the news of the advisory.
At least no one's pants have caught fire...yet.
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