SonyBatteryRecall
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Acer finally gets sucked into Sony battery recall
You've got to hand it to Acer for holding strong while lesser manufacturers folded in the face of cries over "consumer safety," but the Taiwanese giant has finally caved and issued a voluntary recall of about 27,000 Sony-made laptop batteries over eight months after Dell pulled back the first four million,and half a year following its initial consultations with Sony. Affected models include a slew of TravelMate and Aspire notebooks sold between May 2004 and November 2006, so Acer owners should hit the Read link to match up serial numbers -- and then shutdown immediately in favor of AC power if they do happen to sport one of the explosion-prone packs. As usual, the company will replace your battery for free as long as you visit the proper site or dial the toll-free blah blah blah...can we finally put this meme to bed already?
Sony to lose estimated $560m on batteries, PS3
Analysts are predicting that Sony will cut out $560 million from its projected profits for the year due to not only the huge battery recall they're facing (feeling the battery on this Vaio, obviously is exempt from the recall... score!) but also due to the price cut of the PS3 in Japan. Originally, Sony's profits were going to meet or exceed 1.1 billion dollars. This is pretty much a 50% loss. That sucks. Legal action against Sony would vastly increase this percentage loss as well. Those will probably come rolling in sooner or later, since law suits are so freakin' popular anymore. Not that we blame the other companies. Dell was the first to experience this pain, as the picture illustrates -- a Dell notebook violently exploding into flames at a seminar in Osaka. What did Sony say in response? An anonymous representative said "the battery fires were actually sparked by the effect of Dell's hardware on the faulty batteries." Now, let's take a moment of humor from all this seriousness. Could it be that the Microsoft Windows and the Sony battery got into a brawl and the puny Dell exploded from all the competitive tension? It's just kind of funny that things with both Microsoft and Sony don't agree (unless it's this Sony Vaio, apparently).Now, not to sound elitist, but this is what we should be concentrating on. Sure, it's not "video game news", it's not the ever-so-important "console war", but it's incredibly pertinent to the video game console business as a whole -- if Sony gets knocked around for faulty batteries badly enough, they might have to pull out of a market completely. Will it be the video game console market? Probably not, unless the PS3 garners enough bad press to hinder sales (it's getting close).
