CASPER
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By Christopher Null There's nothing at all exciting about the LG 150 cell phone. It's a simple clamshell with no QWERTY keyboard, a basic web browser, Java, a speakerphone, and a tip calculator. Oh, and it exceeds the safety limits for radiation as set by the Canadian government. (The US has the same limit, by the way.)
After the phone failed random emissions tests -- the first time any phone has failed them in Canada -- LG was forced to recall the handsets, with 129,000 phones affected.
And that's the catch. Canadian lawmakers ordered LG to recall the phones way back in March 2008, but it wasn't until January 2009 that the recall actually went into effect, and even then only after a second request was sent to LG that month to get the phones off the market.
The problem is that consumers were using potentially dangerous phones for close to a year, and there's really been no explanation about what went wrong with the process that caused the phones to remain on the market. For its part, LG claims it "responded immediately ... and acted as quickly as appropriately to address any issues that came up." Hmmmm, maybe the first letter demanding a recall got lost in the mail?
LG also pinned the blame for the problem on a subcontractor in China that built certain batches of the phone in question and which it says it has ceased to do business with.
Cell phone recalls are quite rare: Only four cell phone handsets have ever been recalled anywhere in the world. And that's what makes this news so troubling: If this doesn't happen all that often, it shouldn't be that hard to coordinate a recall, should it? A delay of nearly a year is simply unacceptable, yet no one seems to be overly concerned about the risks that consumers faced during that time.
Anyone sense a lawsuit in the making?