My iPhone 5 Exploded

Thought it would melt down first, but this was bad enough. Noticed that the transparent plastic screen cover on my Otterbox was too loose, bulging over the screen, making it more difficult to use touch functions. The top left edge of the Otterbox case was also cracked, but there were no marks anywhere that could suggest that it was snagged and pulled. The holster protects that part of the case and this device has never been dropped.

I had to take the phone out of the case when my headset adapter wouldn’t fit securely, and found that the iPhone 5 was not resting flat on the table. Closer inspection showed that the metal case was bowed, and the screen had been pushed out, more on the left than on the right. The polarized privacy screen must have prevented the glass from shattering, since glass can’t maintain this shape by itself.

It appears that the iPhone partially self-destructed by apparently heating the battery (under the left side of the screen) and pushing the screen out of the case. The Otterbox case looks like the plastic top snapped when the screen pushed against it. The top of the battery is slightly visible in the screen’s present position. But the screen will not go back down, and it obviously destroyed.

Before I looked closer at the phone and case, I was complaining to Verizon Wireless about late voice mail alerts (six days to show “new” voice mail messages). VZW was fairly useless on this issue, but after resetting the network settings (which wipes the device), the device was freezing within the setup application, and not allowing privacy options to be set. Can’t use the device like that, so I can’t reload my data without fixing this. And VZW doesn’t want to hear about this issue now, even though I’m still paying for service.

With the device wiped, and just using either the map application or Safari, the device is now getting too hot to hold. Note that that’s only for built-in apps that use data. I turned off cell data and opened a stream off the internet over Wi-Fi and it’s barely warm. Switched the stream to cell data and the device gets noticeably warm but not hot. The IOS update process exited with no errors, so there’s something in this IOS load that’s very wrong.