ThinkPad confirmed as burning laptop
Tom Krazit
CNET News.com
September 21, 2006, 10:50 BST
Lenovo has said that one of its laptops caught fire at Los Angeles
International Airport, but it can't confirm yet whether Sony
batteries were being used
A burning laptop that frightened passengers at Los Angeles
International Airport over the weekend was a ThinkPad, Lenovo
confirmed Wednesday, and that notebook ships with Sony's battery
technology.
The incident, described by a poster at the Web site Something
Awful, involved a passenger running back up the jetway as a plane
was boarding with a smoking laptop that eventually caught fire.
Lenovo dispatched a team of investigators to Los Angeles within 12
hours of the incident, and confirmed that the laptop was a
ThinkPad T43, said Ray Gorman, a company spokesman.
Because the area of the computer containing the battery was
severely burned as a result of the incident, Lenovo has yet to
confirm that the ThinkPad T43 was using one of Sony's batteries,
Gorman said. That model does ship with Sony's batteries, but some
notebook users choose to use different batteries after they
purchase the system, he said.
Lenovo has still not seen an unusual number of incidents involving
its notebooks and Sony's batteries, Gorman said. PC and consumer
electronics companies have always had problems with batteries on
occasion, but Sony's batteries were at the heart of two huge
battery recalls announced by Dell and Apple in August. That
particular recall was caused by Sony battery cells that could
potentially cause a short circuit if tiny shards of metal left over
from the manufacturing process worked holes in the battery
cells.
At the time of the Dell and Apple recalls, Lenovo took great pains
to distance itself from its competitors, saying it uses a different
charging voltage in its notebooks and has a different design for
its battery casing.
Lenovo and Sony are working together to determine if the battery
involved in last weekend's incident was one of the ones involved in
the recall, and more information is expected over the next couple
of days, Lenovo's Gorman said.
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