It’s one of the most popular 7-inch tablets on the market. It features Android Jelly Bean, a small compact size, and an alluring $199 price tag for 16GB of storage. Of course I’m talking about Google’s Nexus 7 tablet manufactured by Asus.
It made the news this morning for a slightly different reason and garnered a bit of negative attention to itself as a result. Apparently one Chinese customer bought a new Nexus 7 only to later be disturbed by the site of it randomly catching on fire. It appears to have been caused by spontaneous combustion of the battery. According to the user, the fire was so bad that the black smoke emitting from the tablet began to consume the entire room.
This is hardly the first time a device has spontaneously combusted. There have been plenty of stories in the past about iPods that suddenly blew up as well as handsets from numerous manufacturers. It’s just the misfortune some people have to deal with when they end up unknowingly purchasing a faulty unit. It does pose a significant threat to the user, however. The situation could have been much worse had the Nexus 7 been a phone he was carrying around in his pants pocket when it exploded.
The images of the Nexus 7 are pretty gruesome — that thing is totally annihilated. You can check out the full gallery in the Baidu forum post direct from the owner who identifies online as hong_999999.
[via MiniMachines; translated here; image via Flickr]