Baidu

The Nexus 7 has been one of the smokin' hot tablets of 2012, and unfortunately for one user in China, that was literally the case.

Baidu

The user posted the photo above to a forum on Baidu (China's home-grown answer to Google), claiming that the device began smoking while plugged in and charging on its original factory charger. In the process, the guts of the tablet seem to have been totally torched.

To me -- and likely anyone else who has had the experience of ruining an electrically powered product thanks to the wildly unpredictable and sometimes surging electrical grids of other countries -- this sounds like an infrastructure fail. However, we have seen enough reports of malfunctioning, overheating, and even smoking device batteries to make this story plausible.

At first, this anonymous forum user's story seemed a bit hard to believe, but Asus tells me via e-mail that it did work with the person in question even though the Nexus 7 is currently not sold in China.

The company says, however, that it did not offer up a free pair of Google Glasses as was mentioned in the forum and reported here earlier. Apparently, that forum post was meant as a joke. Sometimes humor doesn't survive being run through Google Translate.

Update, November 12, 6:19 a.m. PT: to add comments from Asus and reflect that an offer of free Google Glasses was never part of the replacement deal.

(Via Phandroid)