Dell seeks to blame Sony over batterygate

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

Here's some rough Powerpointery:

The cost of this recall goes well into hundreds of millions of dollars. Whether Dell will be able to hit Sony with a claim is unclear. At any rate, we can't imagine Mikey Dell having a decent night's sleep tonight.

Our source confirmed that the celebrated INQUIRER story realised all the darkest fears in Dell, and that the company went into overdrive to track down what was wrong with that series.

But the number of models with a potential problem exceeded all expectations.

And now the firm is recalling all four million 163 thousand of them in order to save its blushes. Sheesh! µ