Reports: Exploding Droid 2 Injures Man

A Texas man has claimed that his new Android Droid 2 smartphone exploded, sending him to the emergency room for four stitches.

Aron Embry, a 30-year-old man from Cedar Hill, Texas, told a local television news programme that he was making a call while about to set off for work when the incident occurred.

Exploding screen

“I heard a pop,” he said. “I didn’t feel any pain initially. I pulled the phone down. I felt something dripping. I realised that it probably was blood… I looked at my phone and noticed the screen appeared to have burst outward.”

Embry said he drove to the school where his wife Kara Embry works and she said at first it appeared that he had been shot.

He spent four hours in the emergency services ward of a Dallas hospital and received four stitches in his left ear, according to reports.

Embry does not have insurance to cover the $4,000 medical bill and said he will seek legal advice on recouping the costs from Motorola. Motorola said in a statement that it considers customer safety its highest priority and that the company will investigate the incident.

Images of the Droid 2 handset show it with cracks running through the screen and covered with blood. The handset still functions, according to reports.

Previous incidents of mobile devices causing bodily harm have most frequently involved defective batteries. For instance, Apple in August 2008 issued a recall for a small number of iPod Nano devices following reports of the devices catching fire in Japan.

Flaming iPhones

In December of 2008, a Kentucky mother filed a lawsuit against Apple claiming that her son’s iPod Touch had exploded in his pocket, melting through his underwear and burning his leg.

In July of last year, an iPod Touch belonging to an 11 year old girl from Liverpool apparently “exploded”. The girl’s father Ken Stanborough, 47, said that he dropped the device which then made a “hissing noise” and eventually exploded. “There was a pop, a big puff of smoke and it went 10ft in the air,” he reportedly said.

In the same month a reporter from Seattle’s KIRO TV station reported that the station had used the Freedom of Information Act to get the Consumer Product Safety Commission to turn over 800-pages which referred to issues of iPods overheating.

In August of last year the European Commission said it would investigate exploding iPod and iPod Touch incidents reported in Europe.

Reports said the battery does not seem to have been involved in this case.