Toshiba recalls more Sony laptop batteries

Japanese electronics company Toshiba Corp. said on Thursday it has recalled 10,000 Sony Corp.-made batteries for laptop computers because of a fire risk, less than a year after a separate but more massive recall of Sony batteries.

Toshiba is recalling the battery packs manufactured on Dec. 3, 2005, after three of its laptop computers — two in Japan and one in Australia — caught fire between September and June. No one was hurt in the incidents.

The recalled batteries are different from the ones involved in a massive recall of Sony lithium-ion battery packs last year.

In the latest recall, only 5,100 batteries are potentially defective but a total of 10,000 are being recalled because they were shipped about the same time.

Sony spokesman Tomio Takizawa said the batteries at issue were made solely for Toshiba notebooks, which sold them under the brands Dynabook, Dynabook Satellite, Satellite and Tecra. The notebooks were sold in Japan, the U.S., Europe, Australia, China, the spokesman said.

Last year's massive recall was announced after it was found that the lithium-ion batteries could overheat and catch fire. Almost 10 million notebook batteries were affected, including those used by Dell Inc., Lenovo Inc., Apple Inc. and Acer Inc. Toshiba alone had to recall some 800,000 Sony-manufactured batteries from its notebook computers.

Sony said the problems were caused by microscopic metal particles that somehow got inside the batteries, causingshort circuits.

Both Toshiba and Sony are investigating the cause of the most recent battery problems.