[txcwpalpha]

Yea, I dunno what that guy is talking about. Batteries carry incredible amounts of energy, certainly enough to output significant amounts of heat. After all, there was that whole scandal where Samsung cell phone batteries were exploding into burning fireballs...

[noonespecial]

The potential energy of a battery carrying out the intended chemical reaction to generate electricity and the potential energy of lighting it on fire and burning that same battery in air are very different things.

Modern batteries are impressive compared to their predecessors but adding up the watt-hours in a battery and then calculating how much that would heat a bucket of water is a serious disappointment.

[txcwpalpha]

You're telling me that you've never held a phone on your hand and had it get hot? C'mon man. Every modern phone that I know of gets quite hot when doing something like streaming video or taking a voice call for an extended period of time. You can do a simple Google search and see that people quite often discuss how their phone gets uncomfortably hot during all kinds of normal activities.

Nobody said anything about heating a bucket of water. The discussion was about heating up someone's ear, which certainly happens.