Toshiba Recalls 830,000 Sony Batteries

By Niladri Sekhar Nath

TMCnet Contributing Editor

 

Toshiba Corp. has decided to recall 830,000 lithium-ion notebook batteries manufactured by Sony Corp. Toshiba’s (News - Alert) battery recall comes after Lenovo and IBM (News - Alert) recalled batteries just yesterday.

 

At the moment, the company has decided to recall batteries of Dynabook, Qosmio, Satellite Portege and Tecra models, Toshiba spokesman Keisuke Omori told SpyMac in a report.

 

According to the Spymac report, Toshiba made the decision after receiving a request from Sony. However, Omori commented that overheating issues were not involved in the fresh recall.

 

Toshiba has been casting aspersions on Sony batteries for quite sometime. Earlier this month, the company said that the Sony-made batteries are likely to cause data loss if users turn off the computers all of a sudden without saving the data. Just last week, Toshiba recalled 340,000 Sony batteries.

 

A majority of the leading IT companies are currently on a recalling spree.  Lenovo Group Ltd and International Business Machines Corp (IBM) have already decided to recall 526,000 Sony-made lithium-ion batteries for ThinkPad laptop computers. Dell recalled 4.1 million and Apple 1.8 million.

 

Both Dell (News - Alert) and Apple are recalling Sony battery-enabled ThinkPad R, T and X Series sold between February 2005 and September 2006 in particular.

 

Sony is likely to suffer a major setback because of the recalls. According to an estimate, just the Dell and Apple recalls could cost Sony $170-250 million.