Is that a bomb in your pocket? Or a spy? Or both?

Remember how much fun it used to be getting a new phone? I think of a friend a few years ago who was getting his first iPhone. He’d been on a waiting list, and he found out it was coming in on a Saturday when his newish girlfriend was coming to stay. She’d want to spend the weekend having wild and inventive twenty-something sex, he realised with a sinking heart, and perhaps going to the local farmers’ market. Whereas he’d want to spend it playing with his new iPhone. So he told her he was sick, and she accused him of having an affair. Which in a way I suppose he was.

It’s not like that now. You get a new phone and it’s basically the same as your old phone, albeit perhaps half a millimetre thinner. Dullsville. So congratulations to Samsung for their long-overdue achievement in putting the excitement back into mobile phones. By making them explode.

The Samsung Galaxy Note 7 is one of the larger smartphones around, only slightly smaller than one of those things we used to read before we all had them, which I think were called ‘books’. It is by all accounts a phone with almost no flaws aside from the way it is liable to burst into flames somewhat. The South Korean firm started selling them in August, and the first one blew up five days later. By the middle of September they’d sold about a million and they were blowing up all over the place. So they recalled them all and changed the battery, whereupon another one, now deemed safe, blew up on a flight from Kentucky. As of this week, the company has stopped making them and asked everybody everywhere to turn them off.