Dell seeks to blame Sony over batterygate

Head for the hairy hills

By Theo Valich: Tuesday 15 August 2006, 01:51
THE CITY OF SPLIT is a tourist city currently over-run by several thousand Americans. While eating the fish at famous fish diner Sumica (direct English translation is small forest - local meaning is a certain crop of hair on top of Venus hill), we had the opportunity to discuss the matter of exploding laptops with an anonymous bloke from Dell.

Between reading the powerpointish slides and eating the delightful Sparus Aurata, we managed to uncover some surprising facts about the recall.

Dell reckons it chose the Sony Corporation to deliver a huge batch of batteries because it deemed it trustworthy.

But now, after the INQUIRER posted pictures of one such cell exploding mid-conference in Japan, Dell wants to pass the buck and blame Sony for its public relations nightmare.

The recall starts at entry-level notebooks and reaches up to the high-end XPS series, in all of its iterations. All of the batteries were delivered between April 1st, 2004 to July 18th, 2006. Some are evidently faulty and may cause a real messy situation for unsuspecting notebook user.

The following models are subject of voluntary battery recall:

Latitude D410, D500, D505, D510, D520, D600, D610, D800, D810

Inspiron 6000, 8500, 8600, 9100, 9200, 9300, 500m, 510m, 600m, 6400, E1505, 700m,710m, 9400, E1705

Precision M20, M60, M70 and M90 mobile workstations; and

XPS, XPS Gen2, XPS M170 and M1710