More Exploding Cellphones In The News 328
adityapandey writes "It's happened again. Yahoo News has another story on exploding cellphones. Most of these mishaps are blamed on counterfeit batteries and chargers. Recently, Kyocera recalled about 40,000 cellphones for free replacement, because of batteries overheating and venting superheated gases. Yet, cellphone makers claim that such incidents are too rare to care about. Shouldn't cellphone companies be making people aware of the hazards of usage?"
Very Small Percentage (Score:5, Interesting)
Too rare to care about? (Score:5, Interesting)
Hmmm... How well did that logic work against Ephedra or Firestone Wilderness AT tires?
I'm more worried about... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Too rare to care about? (Score:5, Interesting)
Yikes (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:answer in short (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Very Small Percentage (Score:3, Interesting)
Again, those percentages are so small I would say that the companies still have made the consumers more then reasonably confident in the safety of their material....whats the instances (per year) that regular phones hurt people? Or tv's? You are putting an electrical device about 3 inches from your brain - something COULD happen - apparantly its very small percentage but it is possible...it's also possible that an asteroid is goign to hit the planet.
Re:answer in short (Score:2, Interesting)
I used to work for a phone company that did a recall on the Kyocera 7135 (apparently no exhaust was installed on the battery).
All I can say is that under your contract they wipe themselves clean of *evreything* that could possibly happen and it is then the responsibility of the user. If you ever try to make a case other wise they will refer you to your contract, store you bought it from (or likely in this case undertaker) and tell you to shove it or go though mazes of 'pass the buck'.
Trust me (or check *your* contract) they cover their ass nice and clean. Of course most companies will put on a good public face and say even though its not our shit we will be happy to tell you all how to shovel it.
Kyocera Profits (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Very Small Percentage (Score:5, Interesting)
You have to define your terms. What does "safe" mean? Does it mean that the product will never harm someone? If so, then the product cannot be produced - there is no such thing as a perfectly safe object.
If you accept that it is acceptable that sold objects can have some margin of risk associated with them, then, yes, your next question comes into play.
If the phones had a 1 out of 500,000 chance of killing someone, would you still be okay with demanding the low price unsafe product?
That depends on the price point for more or less safety, the usage pattern, what exactly the "chance of killing someone" means (e.g., over the lifetime of the product, per use, etc.), and the actual utility of the item.
These are partially actuarial questions, and partially personal utility/economic questions only individuals can make for themselves. There are products out there that have much higher death/serious injury risks associated with them that are happily bought and sold every day (think parachutes and prescription drugs, for starters).
Bruce Schneier has a great quote about this:
Another example: More children drown every year in 5 gallon buckets than due to guns. I see no "million mom marches" against these preventable deaths, even though safety features could be thought up to prevent bucket drownings at significantly less cost-per-unit than some of the features proposed for guns. (Sorry, I couldn't find a reference for that figure on buckets online - I read it in the Economist some time back.)If you don't accept that safety is an economic tradeoff, you'll never be able to make rational choices about safety.
(For my part, I hate cell phones, so I don't have one because the (negative) utility of the product is certainly not worth the cost - no risk analysis needed.)
Cost benefit analysis .... (Score:3, Interesting)
So they're not going to make sure to tell consumers about it unless they have no choice. And until they can be shown it really happens with their products which are used as designed, they may not believe it.
In reality, the way industry will make this decision is a cost-benefit analysis. In the airline industry, for example, wether or not to do a refit/new safety measure/etc is defined by a formula which measures how often it's likely to happen, and how much it costs if it did.
Using an average industry payout of $2mil/death (I think that's close), a $20 million upgrade will only happen if 10 people are expected to die from it. If the math says the upgrade is cheaper than paying for deaths, it gets done. If 3 people might die over 20 years, then the math says it's cheaper to let people die and pay settlements than to make the change.
It would be naive to think that the cell-phone industry is going to start running around saying "oh my god, they exploded".
Re:Very Small Percentage (Score:2, Interesting)
There's a dandy one out in Arizona. I like it because it's very photogenic. There are about 150 known major impact craters and God only knows how many actual meteorites predating 1775 just lying around (they can be dated with reasonable accuracy from the strata they are found in).
While there is speculation that a meteorite strike killed the dinosaurs, there is little evidence to suggest that any homo sapiens were around to have been killed by it.
You seem to be laboring under the misaprehension that the lack of homo sapiens around when the "dinosaur meteor" struck has anything to do with whether you will be around when the next meteor strikes.
It's the statistical equivilent of The Gambler's Fallacy (The Gambler's Fallacy is probabilistic). It kills people. Pliny the Elder, for one.
Also, whether or not the meteor was responsible for the extinction of the dinosaurs has no bearing on whether or not it hit any particular dinosaurs, and it's a rather peculiar idea to think that it makes a difference statistically that it was a dinosaur standing there instead of a person. Dinosaurs, people, hamsters, warthogs, cardboard cutouts, they're all perfectly equivilent with regards to risk factor of being hit by a ten kilometer in diameter rock you know.
In any case, statistics do not determine reality. They are history. This makes them a crude predictive tool for those repetitious things of which we are ignorant of the determinisitc parameters. For those things of which we are certain we have better and more accurate predictive tools.
Statistics can give us some idea of the rate and geographic distribution of meteor impacts. From this we can make a deduction of whether or not there will be people standing where the next "big one" hits, since we also know the geographic distribution of people, and it's the "big ones" that have an overriding influence on the risk factor of being hit.
If a rock the size of Manhatten hits Manhatten we can deduce that it will hit a lot of people, even though the one that hit the dinosaurs only hit dinosaurs.
"Hey, that minefield must be perfectly safe for people, because we ran some dogs across it and only dogs got blowed up, not people."
Oooooooooook, Sparky. You first.
There are people here now, and now is what counts now. Statistics are then.
But let's skip all the shenanigan's over asteroid risk (actually, I was rather critical of the risk factor calculation when it appeared as a Slashdot story some time ago, but I obviously haven't let that influence my arguments now
Annual risk of being in an auto accident (rounded off to pleasing figures):
1 in 12
Dying in an auto accident:
1 in 5000
Having your car spontaneously combust:
1 in 10,000
Having your cell phone spontaneously combust:
1 in 4,000,000 (less than one per state of the union)
Having your cell phone spontaneously combust causing injury (not counting dolls):
1 in 8,500,000
Having your cell phone spontaneously combust causing injury if you aren't using counterfit batteries/chargers:
1 in 100,000,000
Having your cell phone blow up and kill you:
Zipola
Sell your car, buy lots of cell phones. You'll live longer (unless you get hit by a big asteroid, of course).
KFG