Archos 7 Battery Bulge Horror!

I’ve not written much about my Archos 7, but I need to write today! I’ve had my Archos 7 since December; it was a lovely Christmas gift from my wife. I’ve been using it regularly for the last 6 months; not heavily, but I’ve used it for good stretches of time on my business trips, and when I needed to finish a television series during lunch. All in all, I’ve been pleased with it. But today – the horrot! I pull it out to find the battery was in an odd position… It appeared popped out. My first impression was that someone must have dropped it and the battery got knocked loose, but the battery wouldn’t go back in, and upon further inspection, I noticed that battery had buldged and popped out of it’s casing and thus popping out of the Archos!

I’ve never experienced this, and it looks like googling around no-one has either, and Archos obviously isn’t saying much about it on their site. The disheartening thing about this, is their warranty period is only 6 months, and I just reached my 6th month… So I had to call support.

Archos boasts 7 day a week CST support and today is Sunday. I tried in the morning, but gave up. This evening I was able to get someone, an American sounding person too! Apparently the guy at the other end wasn’t surprised to hear about this, I guess it seems that this is a common problem. He didn’t give me a hard time and I will be able to RMA my battery. 

I’m not sure what to make of this so far… I’ve owned quite a number of devices, and I’ve never had a battery do this before… I mean, I’ve had batteries go bad, but nothing like this.

I’ll write back and add images about what it looks like tomorrow.