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Lenovo laptop latest to go up in flames
Sony battery tech to blame?

By Tom Krazit

Published: Thursday 21 September 2006

A burning laptop that frightened passengers at Los Angeles International Airport over the weekend was a ThinkPad, Lenovo confirmed on Wednesday, and that laptop ships with Sony's battery technology.

The incident, described by a poster at the website 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 the laptop was a ThinkPad T43, said 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, the spokesman said. That model does ship with Sony's batteries but some laptop users choose to use different batteries after they purchase the system, he said.

Lenovo still has not seen an unusual number of incidents involving its laptops and Sony's batteries, according to the spokesman. Sony's batteries were at the heart of two huge battery recalls announced by Apple and Dell 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 Apple and Dell recalls, Lenovo took great pains to distance itself from its competitors, saying it uses a different charging voltage in its laptops 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 spokesman said.

Tom Krazit writes for CNET News.com