Notebook makers meet to discuss new battery standards
Amidst a flurry of notebook battery recalls, several notebook makers including Dell, Hewlett-Packard and Lenovo have met in San Jose to discuss possible new battery standards. Sony, the battery manufacturer at the center of recent battery recalls, was not invited to the meeting, according to Sony spokesman John Dolak. It's unclear if Apple attended the meeting.
The meeting was sponsored by the IPC industry group and was chaired by John Grosso, a Dell executive. Along with finding out what went wrong with the batteries, notebook companies discussed new ways of testing and manufacturing lithium-ion batteries. Battery standards already exist with other trade organizations and any new standard would have to be voluntarily accepted by member companies.
Several notebook makers have announced battery recalls in recent months. Dell and Apple recalled almost 6 million batteries total and Toshiba recently recalled 340,000 units.
Polycom, a maker of conference phones, was also at the meeting. Back in February, it had recalled almost 28,000 wireless conference systems because of possibly faulty batteries.
Related article:
PC Vendors Blame Batteries, Not Notebook Design
Get Tom's Hardware's best news and in-depth reviews, straight to your inbox.
Humphrey Cheung was a senior editor at Tom's Hardware, covering a range of topics on computing and consumer electronics. You can find more of his work in many major publications, including CNN and FOX, to name a few.