Toshiba Recalls 340,000 Notebook Batteries

Toshiba is the third company to announce major recall of Sony-built notebook batteries within the past five weeks. Following 4.1 million Dell notebooks and 1.8 million Apple computers, Toshiba today said that it is recalling 340,000 notebooks worldwide and 100,000 in the U.S. to replace their battery packs.

According to Toshiba, the affected batteries were manufactured between March and May of this year and were used in the models Satellite A100/A105, M50/M55, M100/M105 as well as the Tecra A6 and A7.

While the Dell and Apple recalls were due to an overheating problem that actually resulted in a few "exploded" notebooks, Toshiba says that the recall was issued as the batteries may suddenly fail to properly charge or discharge. In such a case, a notebook that is not connected to an external power supply will simply shut down without prior notice.

Toshiba said that Sony has fixed the battery problem and batteries that were built on or after 1 June should work without problems.

The latest battery recall increases the number of recalled Sony batteries to more than 6.3 million. Without the latest recall, it was estimated that Sony's cost to replace the batteries in Dell and Apple systems was about $267 million.