Beyond
what you’ve seen in the blogosphere, there is no update on the now infamous “flaming
notebook” from Osaka. We replaced the customer’s computer and are
still investigating the cause. We think it was a fault in a lithium ion battery
cell.
Update (8-14): Alex Gruzen just published a post that outlines the details of our battery recall program.
Dell’s
engineering teams are working with the Consumer Product Safety Commission and a
third-party failure analysis lab to determine the root cause of this failure
and to ensure we take all appropriate measures to help prevent a
recurrence. By the way, lithium ion batteries are used in billions of
notebooks, mp3 players, PDAs and cell phones these days.