Blogs buzz on Dell battery recall

The news that Dell is recalling more than four million batteries for its laptop computers has become a talking point in the blogosphere.

Within hours of the news, bloggers were discussing alleged long-standing problems with Dell products and swapping news and video footage. We round up some of the blog chatter.

THE INQUIRER

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.

ENGADGET

While we are a little wary of one Dell exec's statement that they're 'getting ahead of the issue', which in our opinion would have actually been issuing this recall four months ago, we're glad they're finally taking care of business before someone actually gets hurt.

SLASHDOT

This seems to go along with a June Slashdot story on an exploding Dell laptop, and a July Slashdot story on a Dell investigation into its exploding laptops. Curiously, there is nothing yet on Dell Support's product recall page about this latest recall.

THE REGISTER

Dell's customer satisfaction flameout has started to reach record levels. The company today issued a recall for 4.1 million laptop batteries out of fear that they could catch fire. The product recall stands as the largest ever for the US consumer electronics industry.

Over the past two months, numerous stories have appeared documenting Dell laptops' habit of igniting.

Fire-breathing laptops are the last thing you want when you're a company spending hundreds of millions of dollars to repair a fractured relationship with consumers.

ARS TECHNICA

Increasing power demands of modern laptops, with bigger and brighter screens, faster processors, and faster hard drives, have all put strains on the ability of the batteries to keep up.

Packing all that power into such a small space sometimes leads to disaster, as happened to an unfortunate Dell laptop in June at a conference at Osaka, Japan.