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Lithium-Ion Batteries and More Sony Recall News

The November issue of Wired has a great article on " Building a Better Battery ". John Hockenberry begins with a story of a battery that catches fire, and then takes us to the first battery built in the 1800s. Hockenberry quickly takes us through the history to the point of talking about lithium-ion. Today, most Li-ion cells contain at least two – and sometimes three – separate countermeasures to keep the reaction from getting out of control. Finally, we hear a bit about Sony before Hockenberry concludes with the current research in battery technology. CNet reported on October 23rd that Sony has even more battery recalls. Batteries that shipped with laptops sold by Fujitsu, Gateway, Sony and Toshiba comprise this recall... ...worldwide tally... ...more than 3 million... This extends the list to Dell, Lenovo/IBM, Apple, Sharp, Fujitsu, Gateway, Sony, and Toshiba.

Battery Recall Information from the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Council

I figured that I could find all the lithium-ion battery recalls by looking at the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Council website -- I was wrong. Here is what I found, but it is missing quite a few. Dell, December 2005 and August 2006 Apple, May 2005 and August 2006 Lenovo / IBM, September 2006 HP, October 2005 and April 2006 Battery-Biz, June 2005 It is unfortunate that this website is incomplete. The U.S. Consumer Product Safety Council also released tips on notebook computer usage in September of this year. Interestingly enough, I found a laptop battery recall as far back as 1994 . For those of you who are interested, the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Council has new recalls announced each week. You can sign up for an email or even subscribe to a podcast to listen to the recalls.

Sony Recalls Their Own Batteries

After many months, Sony has finally issued a recall of their batteries in their Vaio laptops . The list of companies who have recalled Sony batteries now include Dell, Apple, Toshiba, Sharp , Fujitsu, Lenovo , Hitachi, and Sony. The only major manufacture that has not recalled Sony batteries is HP, which is a bit odd considering all the other manufacturers eventually placing a recall. As you may recall, Sony originally said the problem was limited to Dell, and then Dell and Apple . Seem just a matter of time before HP is part of the crowd too. U.S. Today posted on article on October 2nd that indicated Sony will end up replacing 10 million batteries.

More Sony batteries are recalled

If you are still counting, Sony has had to recall over 7 million, yes 7 million, laptop batteries. This has affected Dell, Apple, Lenovo/IBM, and Toshiba. According to ZDNet and CNet , Sony's stock has dropped 8.2% since the first battery recalls in the Dell laptops. Of course the stock drop also takes into account the long delay to the PS3 game console. Analyst Masahiro Ono from Morgan Stanely: Sony's battery business is expected to have an operating profit margin of about 5 percent in the current business year to March. That compares with Sony's own estimate of its overall operating margin of 1.6 percent for the year. This seems a bit odd with the battery problems -- perhaps there are some financial creativity to handle the expenses related to the recall. I know that the techies, such as myself, pay attention to this stuff, but it will be interesting to see how big of an effect the battery recall and PS3 delay has on Sony's overall business. On top of this, we hea

Mixed News For Sony

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Sony furthers its losses, this time with a battery recall 1.8 million Apple laptops , for a total of 4.8 million batteries. At a cost from $170 to $250 million for their battery problems, I do not think a 2% loss in shares is that much. Interestingly enough, if you look at Sony's stock over the last 12 months in comparison to the NYSE, they are not doing so bad. I plotted closing stock price and trade volume for some of more notable Sony announcements over since the Rootkit problem reported on October 31, 2005. I looked at the day before, the day of, and the day after each announcement. With all the bad things going for Sony, perhaps their recent $65 million purchase of Grouper is good news. Robert Cringely thinks so . Mr. Cringely, in his "i, cringely" column talks about how Sony can use this purchase to learn how to play in the new video era. At number 8 in volume, 1% of video traffic, I think this could be another loss for Sony. How many people have even heard of Gr

Dell Recall Sony Batteries Update

ZDNet is reporting that the laregest battery recall in Dell's history could cost Sony $85M to $430M. Sony also supplies batteries for Hewlett-Packard, Apple Computer and Lenovo. Adrian Kingsley-Hughes of ZDNet says he will folllow the progress on his blog, including any problems with these other manufacturer's laptops. InfoWorld reports that Sony and Dell have been discussing the battery problems for the last 10 months.

Sony Batteries = Dell Recall

Dell has identified several products (4 million in all) that may contain batteries manufactured by Sony that are defective. The affected products are as follows: Latitude: D410, D500, D505, D510, D520, D600, D610, D620, D800, D810 Inspiron: 500M, 510M, 600M, 700M, 710M, 6000, 6400, 8500, 8600, 9100, 9200, 9300, 9400, E1505, E1705 Precision: M20, M60, M70, M90 XPS: XPS, XPS Gen2, XPS M170, XPS M1710 If you own one of these products, Dell has set up a specific website where you can check your battery serial number and learn what to do next. Is this just one more problem for Sony? They had the rootkit problem; the delay to the PS3 ; Blu Ray vs. HD , with a delay and the first models not being able to play movies -- what's next? Oh yeah -- they are struggling in their launch of a music service for their PSP due to DRM issues .

New Battery for Your iPod

I have been using a 3G (3rd generation) iPod for some time that would not hold its charge. I was forced to always keep it plugged in and miss the advantages of listening where ever I wanted. Then in April I ran across an article that said there are replacement do-it-yourself batteries. Sure enough, I found one at Fry's. [I just searched Google on "ipod replacement battery," and got over 5 million results.] It was not easy, but I did successfully change the battery. The not-so-helpful instructions within the package were line drawings, so I went on a search for better instructions. Most of what I found was not any better. Take for example the instructions from ipodbattery.com . They have a much better visual representation than my original instructions, but they never really help you understand how to remove the case and just how hard it is. I eventually found eshop.macsales.com , and they provided a video -- once I learned how to navigate to the right video. In their exam