News & Reviews:   YES Altitude 3

Earlier, we've seen two cases involving the explosion of YES Altitude 3 which is the model of the device given out by the government under the Jaringan Prihatin initiative. Sadly, we have yet another case reported on the YES 4G Community unofficial group on Facebook two days ago, and the cause of the explosion is similar to the previous two.

The user from Pahang posted a few pictures showing the aftermath caused by the explosion. Other than that, the caption also mentioned that the phone exploded suddenly while it had only been in use for two months. Once again, we hope that no one is hurt in this incident.

By now, most of you should be aware of the burnt phones that happened last week. To refresh your memory, these phones (YES Altitude 3) were provided under the Jaringan Prihatin Program and there were two cases where both models caught fire. YTL Communications also reached out to us to give their statement and assures us the phones are still safe to use.

Another day, another phone from Jaringan Prihatin explodes. A couple of days ago, a 9-year-old student's phone battery caught on fire during an online class and the device is the YES Altitude 3 given by the Malaysian government. Luckily, nothing bad happened to anyone in the accident and the student was rewarded a Redmi Note 10 5G by Xiaomi afterwards as a replacement. Now, yet another device from the program exploded while it was charging.

Update: YTL Communications has reached out to us saying that the phone was jointly developed by YES and China Mobile (the world’s largest network operator) for use for education. The same model was given out by the YTL Foundation free to over 100,000 B40 families under its Learn From Home Initiative since the start of the first MCO last year. Prior to this news, there were no reports of any incident of safety relating to the phone. China Mobile has confirmed that the same battery used in this phone has been in production since 2018 and more than 4.5 million units have been shipped globally without any reported incident of this nature. However, the company take this reported incident very seriously as the safety of their products and users is of paramount importance and will investigate the matter fully.

Phones exploding are not an unusual case but perhaps in this news, the Malaysian government ought to take it more seriously. As you already know, every student now relies on either a laptop, computer or device to attend online classes. However, not everyone can afford a desktop PC so the device is the only affordable option.