Florida Man Sues Samsung, Says Galaxy Note 7 Exploded (reuters.com) 102
An anonymous reader shares a Reuters report: Samsung Electronics Co was sued on Friday by a Florida man who said he suffered severe burns after his Galaxy Note 7 smartphone exploded in his front pants pocket. The lawsuit by Jonathan Strobel may be the first in the United States by a Samsung phone user against the South Korean company over a battery defect linked to the Note 7. It was filed one day after Samsung recalled about 1 million Note 7s sold in the United States. Samsung has received 92 reports of batteries overheating in the United States, including 26 reports of burns and 55 reports of property damage, U.S. safety regulators said. "We don't comment on pending litigation," Samsung spokeswoman Danielle Meister Cohen said in an email. "We are urging all Note 7 owners to power their device down and exchange it immediately." Strobel, 28, of Boca Raton, said he was in a Costco store in Palm Beach Gardens on Sept. 9 when his Note 7 exploded. He said the phone burned directly through his pants, resulting in severe burns on his right leg.
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Exactly! Except, you know, coffee is supposed to be hot, but phones are not supposed to spontaneously combust.
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Exactly! Except, you know, coffee is supposed to be hot, but phones are not supposed to spontaneously combust.
As long as they run Android and have a phone jack - its all good.
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Re:Like suing McDonald's for hot coffee (Score:5, Insightful)
Are you joking? Coffee is supposed to be hot, a phone is not supposed to explode. (And McDondald's got in trouble because their coffee was hotter than usual, and they had ignored the risk involved.)
Samsung has not responded well to this problem, and they will pay the price.
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Are you dense? This happened Sep 9th. Recall wasn't official then.
Stay away from poorly engineered Android phones I guess.
And links to a google search showing iphones burning up too! [google.co.uk]
:-)
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And links to a google search showing iphones burning up too!
Samsung's always trying to catch up with Apple.
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Are you dense? This happened Sep 9th.
The issues were first reported late August. Samsung announced it was going to recall on Sep 1st. By the 8th the phone had already been banned on major airlines in multiple countries, by the 9th the government issued an advisory to stop using it. The only thing dense would be someone still using their phone at this point.
Stay away from poorly engineered Android phones I guess.
Yeah because the handful of phones which have exploded is really a bad trend from a company that has shipped just short of 10 billion smartphones since it entered the smartphone business.
Pe
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...Similarly with all this "exploded" malarky. I think if something with that much chemical energy were to explode in my trousers pocket, the first thing going through my mind would be "Fuck! Where are my balls? And leg?" if I wasn't actually unconscious or dead, that is. An enthusiastic chemical fire and an explosion are rather different things.
Your post is correct regarding this issue being dealt with by Samsung - I should know. I got a text message about the recall on my Note 7 on the 4th, about 4 h
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And you bought a Samsung anyway?
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Had the problems been discovered before or right up until the moment I forked the money over - of course not. I wasn't buying a iPhone. The problems were only discovered a few days after I'd received, charged & setup the phone. It's been sitting on my desk in the box it arrived in, slowly discharging and I'm going to get it exchanged for a new, battery defect free, unit tomorrow.
While I'm in the shop, I'll be mentioning about it suffering the bootloop of death, challenge them to get it working before
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Do they? When will they fix the design defect called bendgate?
Since bendgate led to touch disease, I guess never?
Re: Like suing McDonald's for hot coffee (Score:1)
Your plurals and possessives are all over the place. The grammar police are on the way.
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a phone is not supposed to explode
Unless you are in a Michael Bay movie !
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> (And McDondald's got in trouble because their coffee was hotter than usual, and they had ignored the risk involved.)
This was the claim made by the plaintiff's attorney, but no, actually it was not.
First, I have no dog in this fight. I think McDonald's food is nasty and I don't go there unless I need coffee in the middle of the night and there's absolutely no other place open.
According to the court records (available many places online, plus the wiki entry) McDonald's served their coffee at 180 to 190
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The reason for this is that 180 to 190 degrees fahrenheit is the proper serving temperature for coffee.
No, 180 to 190 is the common temperature for serving coffee in America by cheap coffee purveyours, because of monetary reasons. Go to Europe and you will be hard pressed to find any coffee shop serving coffee at temperatures greater than 155 degrees, which is the temperature human subjects prefer their coffee at. Here's the relevant quote:
The preferred drinking temperature of coffee is specified in the literature as 140+/-15 degrees F (60+/-8.3 degrees C) for a population of 300 subjects.
In "Calculating th
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Ok, so explain to me. Heat takes money to produce. How can serving a beverage at a hotter temperature be cheaper?
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It hides bad flavor from cheap beans. If you serve coffee at a reasonable temperature, taste dominates your senses, if you serve it boiling hot you get a nice warm feeling and no idea what it tasted like.
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It hides bad flavor from cheap beans. If you serve coffee at a reasonable temperature, taste dominates your senses, if you serve it boiling hot you get a nice warm feeling and no idea what it tasted like.
Ok "boiling hot" is hyperbole, you must know that. But besides that, this doesn't explain why so-called "premium" coffee houses serve coffee in the same temperature range. (From experiment.)
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Ok, so explain to me. Heat takes money to produce. How can serving a beverage at a hotter temperature be cheaper?
I'll explain it to you. As slowly as required.
At the time, McDonald's offered free coffee refills in the USA. So if you sit in the restaurant and drink your coffee, and finish it, you go to the counter and get another one for free. Which costs about twice as much as one coffee.
To avoid this, McDonald's served the coffee so that it was undrinkable hot. So now you eat your food waiting for your coffee to cool down, wait a bit because it is still too hot, then you drink it and now you have spend so much
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Ok, so explain to me. Heat takes money to produce. How can serving a beverage at a hotter temperature be cheaper?
I'll explain it to you. As slowly as required.
Oh yes, please talk down to me.
At the time, McDonald's offered free coffee refills in the USA. So if you sit in the restaurant and drink your coffee, and finish it, you go to the counter and get another one for free. Which costs about twice as much as one coffee.
To avoid this, McDonald's served the coffee so that it was undrinkable hot. So now you eat your food waiting for your coffee to cool down, wait a bit because it is still too hot, then you drink it and now you have spend so much time in a "fast food" restaurant that you don't have time to get another coffee and repeat the waiting game. No free second coffee = money saved for McDonalds.
Ok, so, listen to what you just wrote. It has all the earmarks of a "made by live steam to save money"-grade urban legend -- overly complicated, unlikely, and flying in the face of common sense. It's even possible that a lawyer said this in a closing argument at some time, when they're not required to tell the truth, and can say anything they think will win their case. That doesn't make it true. That actually makes it less likely to be true.
About the temperature: A woman suffered instant third degree burns by pouring coffee on her trousers. If you drank that coffee, you would suffer instant third degree burns in your mouth. If I walked through the restaurant with a coffee and by accident stumbled over my own feet and dropped the coffee on a child, the child would suffer third degree burns. McDonald's was aware of this because they had settled over 700 cases out of court. But they told their staff to make the coffee so hot, so they could claim to offer free refills without anyone taking them up on that offer.
I'm sorry, this doesn't pass the
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https://www.caoc.org/?pg=facts [caoc.org]
http://www.lectlaw.com/files/c... [lectlaw.com]
Coffee hot enough to produce third degree burns is too hot. Third degree burns is past blistering, past melting, all the way to exposed muscle. This isn't a little burn, it is quite extensive. McDonald's was warned repeatedly, and decided that the number of burns (700) occuring wasn't worth doing anything about. They knew the issue existed, and refused to settle for $20,000 as the woman offered (which was the cost of treatment, no more).
Ever
Re: Like suing McDonald's for hot coffee (Score:2)
This is where either hyperbole is occurring or the facts of the case are wrong. The temperature range quoted in the legal briefs was 180 to 190 degrees farenheit, which is not hot enough to expose muscle.
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It is hot enough to produce third degree burns in a matter of 2-10 seconds according to a burn expert used at the trial.
http://www.healthline.com/heal... [healthline.com]
Third degree burns extend through all the layers of skin. It is a very bad burn, and requires hospitalization to properly treat.
Re: Like suing McDonald's for hot coffee (Score:2)
The link describes the type of burns, but I didn't see anything about the temperature range quoted in the briefs having the ability to cause a third degree burn. (Also, i didnt see anything about exposed muscle being one of the symptoms.) Something appears to be wrong here.
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From the second link above:
Plaintiffs' expert, a scholar in thermodynamics applied to human skin burns, testified that liquids, at 180 degrees, will cause a full thickness burn to human skin in two to seven seconds. Other testimony showed that as the temperature decreases toward 155 degrees, the extent of the burn relative to that temperature decreases exponentially. Thus, if Liebeck's spill had involved coffee at 155 degrees, the liquid would have cooled and given her time to avoid a serious burn.
A full thickness burn is another term for a third degree burn.
The exposed muscle was from what I was taught as a Boy Scout, this page seems to show it pretty well:
http://know-your-body.wonderho... [wonderhowto.com]
The blisters and skin can fall away exposing the musculature underneath as the whole skin covering has been damaged beyond your body's ability to repair it. They can even be fatal as bleeding will proceed pretty quickly if it is not treated properly. Take a look at the pictures in that
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150 deg F is not the same thing as 180+ that the expert said will cause "full thickness burns" also, scald is not third degree, but first degree burns.
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Testing for myself isn't going to tell me much. I'd get a measurement of what the current temperature is, at that particular store, on that particular day. It wouldn't tell me what the temperature was for the plaintiff.
The temperature range of the coffee at that particular McDonald's is mentioned in the court proceedings, so apparently someone had the data at some point. It was stated as being between 180 and 190 degrees. This is in the wiki for the lawsuit, and (if you want to be bored to death) is in the court proceedings, also online.
Shortly after the trial, I personally tested several local coffee houses (five, if I remember right -- I probably still have the spreadsheet somewhere), and every single one of them serv
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> (And McDondald's got in trouble because their coffee was hotter than usual, and they had ignored the risk involved.)
This was the claim made by the plaintiff's attorney, but no, actually it was not.
Actually, you're wrong. What doomed McDonald's in that lawsuit was that their own policies and procedures specified that the coffee be served at a lower temperature. Failing to follow their own three-ring binder is actually what got them nailed.
In point of fact, this is the same temperature range that Starbucks, Dutch Brothers and Peets serve their coffee, both then and now. I didn't just take someone's word on this
It doesn't matter whose word you did or didn't take. Your opinion on this case is irrelevant. The fact is that McDonald's uses inferior ultra-thin styrofoam cups which do not remain cuplike at those temperatures. They lose all rigidity and become basically a thick po
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Ok, look. I remember you, and respect your opinion for other things you've written. You may have a good point about the crappiness of the cups -- I had not considered that. Peets or Dutch Brothers use thick(er), undeniably sturdier paper cups and always (in my experience) include one of those brown insulator rings.
180 - 190 vs 160 - 185 is, I would submit, somewhat of a quibble. I was going by the tests I did myself, where in every case regular coffee was in the mid-180's, (which is the top of your rang
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But I would submit that this is entirely different from tinfoil-hat arguments that McDonald's was somehow saving buttloads of money by serving their coffee litigiously hot, which would be more fitting as an item in the Evil Overlord manual.
They were saving a little bit of money at the risk of giving customers serious burns. It's from the Stupid Overlord manual. That's why they're running only two things, Jack and Shit, and Jack has left town: McDonalds "restaurants" are closing left and right [cheatsheet.com] as former customers increasingly opt to eat something else. Since about WWII (apparently, I had to look it up) operating a franchise has been the go-to way for an idiot with a medium-sized handful of money to print more money. It's not typically the brig
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But I would submit that this is entirely different from tinfoil-hat arguments that McDonald's was somehow saving buttloads of money by serving their coffee litigiously hot, which would be more fitting as an item in the Evil Overlord manual.
They were saving a little bit of money at the risk of giving customers serious burns. It's from the Stupid Overlord manual.
Again, what I'm saying is that if you can set aside for a moment your obvious...
That's why they're running only two things, Jack and Shit, and Jack has left town: McDonalds "restaurants" are closing left and right [cheatsheet.com] as former customers increasingly opt to eat something else.
If you've worked for food service (I don't really want to think about that part of my life -- Pre-IT-career, I rose to manager of a fas
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No it is not.
The proper serving temperature for coffee is about 140 F according to the National Coffee Association [ncausa.org], you know, the people who are more interested in the quality of the coffee than how far you can carry the coffee while staying above that temperature in poorly insulated cheap paper cups.
Name one organization that advocates serving coffee at 180 F, and provide a link. You won't be able to fin
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I remember the facts of the case being something like this:
Woman gets coffee and additions (sweet stuff, white stuff) in a McDonald's drive-through. Woman parks. Woman holds cup in her lap and opens it to add sweet stuff and white stuff. Cup collapses when the lid is removed, and spills scalding hot coffee over a lot of her skin. Woman has something like $20K in medical bills, asks McDonald's to reimburse her, they refuse, case winds up in court.
What struck me was not so much the temperature of the
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I remember the facts of the case being something like this:
Woman gets coffee and additions (sweet stuff, white stuff) in a McDonald's drive-through. Woman parks. Woman holds cup in her lap and opens it to add sweet stuff and white stuff. Cup collapses when the lid is removed, and spills scalding hot coffee over a lot of her skin. Woman has something like $20K in medical bills, asks McDonald's to reimburse her, they refuse, case winds up in court.
What struck me was not so much the temperature of the coffee as the way the cup failed. If I were to get some sort of liquid in a cup, I'd expect the cup to be able to hold the liquid, and that was not true for McDonald's coffee cups. The coffee temperature may have weakened the cup, and it certainly caused a lot of damage, but if McDonald's had provided a halfway decent cup there would have been no injury and no lawsuit.
Now *that* is a reasonable point. And it doesn't even require a conspiracy theory. The problem seems to be, (and here we circle back to the battery "exploding") that when something like this happens, the real, true facts of the case are almost immediately replaced by something much more dramatic, and both the plantiff's lawyers and the media are usually complacent in this. Just on the face of it, I personally doubt that any of the phones are "exploding". Maybe getting really hot, enough perhaps for comb
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Samsung has not responded well to this problem
They recalled ALL Note 7 devices. Are you intentionally feigning ignorance? (hint: yes, you are)
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Troll is troll, but let's play.
Should the government regulate these things, or should people sue in a free market?
Look - the free market is always self correcting. As soon as enough people die form Samsung phones, either word will get out, and people stop buying them, or their customers will be dead.
The free market is the answer to everything.
Re:Like suing McDonald's for hot coffee (Score:4, Interesting)
But! (Score:5, Funny)
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The phone would have never exploded if it had a barometric vent.
Who the heck took out the barometric vent? Goddammit! Hipsters always ruining our stuff.....
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Depends on whether FloridaMan wins this lawsuit or not.
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Except that Samsung didn't do an official recall until Sept 15.
http://www.samsung.com/us/note... [samsung.com]
Called Sprint Store and here is response (Score:4, Interesting)
Here are their claims:
- You will be fine if you don't leave it charging overnight
- They will have replacement handsets sometime in the next few weeks.
The first claim is false according to many sources including Samsung. As for the second, they are supposed to have replacements by the 21st but hey that's just a schedule. No one sticks to those apparently.
Old stick re-purposed (Score:1)
Keep minimum safe distance of 1 foot from body
Finally, a reasonable use for the Selfie Stick!
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The failure is a problem with the charging circuit off a single one of their supply lines. The recall issue can only occur during charging, so the line from the plaintiff's lawyer about "the recall came too late for my client" is entirely false, unless of course he charges his phone in his pocket, in which case I'd have to ask what the fuck.
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No seconds on Samsung for me (Score:1)
Bottom line is that I'd already decided I don't want another Galaxy smartphone, though my overall feelings are mixed. This battery fiasco is liable to make my wants moot vis a vis buying anything from Samsung. In accord with the brokenness of today's stock market, the overreactions and spasms of the stock price may destroy the company. Stock price is just a matter of opinion, and it's usually stupid opinion, especially when it's a computer's. What matters is the visibility of the fiasco, and this one is way
Someone should have told Samsung... (Score:2)
That "Halt and catch fire" is only an expression, and not supposed to mean that the phone should literally explode and burn.
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That "Halt and catch fire" is only an expression, and not supposed to mean that the phone should literally explode and burn.
The expression has an origin story [catb.org] with a kernel of truth.
SubjectIsSubject (Score:3)
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I'm starting to wonder whether Florida is merely a fictional peninsula north of Cuba, home to a race of evil super-villains.
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You understanding is faulty. You're welcome.
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bad year for phones (Score:2)
the iphones no longer have headphone jacks — and the samsungs explode in yer pants..!
bleah
I know this one (Score:2)
it's funny how these things work (Score:2, Insightful)
I think I'd be willing to bet my next paycheck that the phone "exploding" is hyperbole by either the plaintiff or the press. Moreover, didn't the initial reports stipulate that the batteries overheated during charging? It's difficult to believe that a phone not connected to anything spontaneously detonated in a pants pocket. The trial might be really entertaining, but Samsung will probably settle out of court.
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"explode"? (Score:2)
I have not seen a single bit of evidence to support the word "explode" being used in context with the Samsung battery problems. I certainly believe they melt, catch fire, even burst into flames... but *explode*???
http://www.dictionary.com/brow... [dictionary.com]
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the rapid expansion of the battery before it goes pop and burst into flames may be considered an explosion, but I have always felt the use of that word was a bit dramatic with lithium batteries
too much! (Score:2)
hasn't Florida Man [twitter.com] been punished enough already? [apnews.com]
"I need to get a (protective) bubble,"
Note to Samsung: (Score:2)
Dear designers:
When Apple had the "courage" to remove headphone jacks to force the sale of expensive bluetooth earbuds, they did so in a way that is pissing people off and losing them business.
Your interpretation of that into "Be salesy! Encourage bluetooth device for listening by making phone courageously explode!" was very poor and might lose you *A LOT OF FUTURE BUSINESS*. Learn to translate the copying of business models. /humor