Mashable reported another case of an exploding smartphone involving the Nexus S model. However, it was not a manufacturing defect, but the fault of the owner who opted to use as a spare unit a cheap battery.

Kirsten Zastrow plugged her mobile phone on the night of March 19 to recharge its battery before she slept on the couch. After two hours, she heard a loud noise and smelled something burning.

She saw a small fire on the floor about a foot high, just a few inches where she laid her head. After she put out the fire, she saw the phone's battery with its inner parts uncoiled.

Ms Zastrow disclosed that the battery she was using was made by a third party, Anker, a California-based company that produces batteries for different mobile devices and laptops noted for their lesser cost.

She posted photos of the damaged battery on Reddit and got over 600 comments, but most of them even defended Anker, pointing out that its batteries even lasted longer than branded ones.

The Web site explained the battery explosion to the design of lithium-ion batteries in which the separator between the positive and negative plates is very thing and there is a tendency for metallic lithium to form in between the separator which causes the short circuit when the battery is overcharged.

Anker promised to make a product recall if it could be proven than battery defect was the cause of the explosion.

Most phone and battery manufacturers opt for slimmer batteries, which unfortunately have lesser life spans.

There are now trials to replace the graphite-based anodes of lithium-ion batteries with silicon that has 10 times the capacity compared to current battery models, but silicon swells when charging which could cause electrical contacts to break during the discharge and degrade the battery.

California Lithium Battery (CLB) is studying the use of a composite of silicon and grapheme which combines silicon's capacity and graphene's stability, Techland.time.com quoted CLB Chief Executive Officer Phillip Roberts.

He hopes that within six months, CLB would be able to manufacture enough of the composite and ship it to battery and phone makers for trial and test. If the experiment works, he said its silicon-based anode could replace current graphite-based anodes in today's batteries which would improve capacity by 30 per cent.