We talked last year and this year about iPhone terminals whose batteries exploded, swelled or caught fire. Cases in which batteries explode are quite rare because most batteries are made of a special material that, in the event of a failure, retains all the energy released by the cells and only swells. In the image above we have two batteries, both of the iPhone 3GS terminal, but one of them is functional and one is destroyed. The one on the right is swollen and it has cracked the case and the metal band of an iPhone 3GS terminal brought by a user to be repaired at a UK company.
We are getting quite a few phones that look like they have been ripped at the seems. When we open them up the battery has ballooned massively. The force is strong enough to break plastic, bend metal, and pop screws.
The images are provided by those from iPatch which seems to receive more and more iPhone terminals with swollen batteries and an iPhone affected by such a problem is unrecoverable in some cases. Although we are talking about the iPhone 3GS here, the iPhone 4 terminals are not immune to problems because some of them are approaching two years old. For the iPhone 4S things are good for now because users are not reporting problems for them.
