Reports of exploding mobile-phone batteries finally hit a high note with the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission announcing a voluntary recall of 140,000 of Kyocera Wireless Corp.’s 7135 smart-phone batteries. The federal agency said the faulty batteries can short circuit and “erupt with force or emit excessive heat, posing a burn hazard to consumers.”
For its part, Kyocera said it has ended its relationship with the Hong Kong-based vendor of the battery in question, and it is considering legal action against the company.
The news comes after several reports of exploding batteries from Nokia Corp., Kyocera and others. However, the recall is perhaps the first instance in which a mobile-phone manufacturer has admitted to selling faulty, exploding batteries.
According to the U.S. safety commission, Kyocera reported four battery failures, including one user who suffered a minor burn. The recall covers Kyocera 7135 phones with the “-05” battery sold through Verizon Wireless, U.S. Cellular and Alltel Corp. between September and December 2003. Kyocera’s CDMA 7135 smart phone features the Palm operating system, 16 MB of onboard RAM and an MMC/SD expansion card slot. The phone sells for about $500. Hong Kong-based Coslight International Group built the batteries, which were manufactured in China. The batteries sold separately for $21.
Kyocera said it immediately halted sales of its 7135 device following reports of a faulty battery. The company said that only about 40,000 of the phones in question made it to end users, and the rest were still in the distribution channel. Kyocera said Coslight has built batteries for other Kyocera phones, but the company designed a custom battery for the 7135. Kyocera said it uses batteries from a variety of vendors.
“We’ve been extremely above the board with this,” said Kyocera spokesman John Chier. “We are considering legal action against this company.”
The U.S. safety commission said Kyocera would contact the phone’s owners and would arrange for the delivery of free replacement batteries.
The news comes just a few months after Kyocera temporarily halted shipments of its KE400/KX400 series mobile phones following a TV news report of a Kyocera phone apparently exploding just days after a Nebraska family purchased it. The company conducted a swift investigation into the incident and determined that the apparent explosion was actually caused by a safety feature built into the phone’s battery. The company said the phone’s battery short-circuited, causing heat and pressure to build up inside of the battery. To prevent a more serious failure, the company said the battery “vented” the heat and pressure by expelling graphite dust. The graphite dust might have led to reports of a smoky explosion, the company said, but the release of graphite dust is a safety feature common to cell-phone batteries, and the dust itself is harmless.
“This is a very unique incident,” said Kyocera’s Chier at the time. “We’re very confident in the safety of the battery and the phone.”
Nokia too has been hounded by reports of exploding mobile-phone batteries, but the company has repeatedly stated the batteries in question are actually faulty counterfeit batteries.
The U.S. CPSC works to protect the public from “unreasonable risks of serious injury or death” from more than 15,000 types of consumer products under the agency’s jurisdiction.
