A man staying in a California hotel was set on fire from his cell phone according to assistant fire chief Kurt Henke. Luis Picaso, 59, was unlucky enough to be wearing highly flammable polyester clothing when his cell phone apparently malfunctioned and set his attire ablaze. Mr. Picaso suffered second and third degree burns over much of his body. The sprinkler system kicked in and kept the flames down after a plastic chair caught fire. Fire chief Henke declined to mention the vendor of Mr. Picaso's phone.
It's not unheard of for phones to randomly have electrical problems, sometimes bad enough to cause burns, but phone manufacturers tend to blame the problems on faulty after market batteries. MobileTracker first mentioned the phenomenon back in 2003 when a woman experienced slight neck burns from her Nokia. Today's story is however the worst case of a cell phone fire that we've ever heard.