Leading notebook makers Apple, Dell, and Lenovo will hold a summit meeting in San Jose, Calif. next month to begin development of standards for the manufacture of lithium ion batteries for portable and handheld electronics.
The move comes on the heels of Dell's announcement this month that it is recalling 4.1 million lithium-ion batteries — the largest consumer electronics recall in history. The notebook batteries, which include cells manufactured by Sony, may overheat and could pose a fire risk, Dell said.
"Without a doubt, standardization can and will address the issue of operation and safety called into question by the use of lithium ion batteries.," said John Grosso, chairman of the IPC OEM Critical Components Committee and director of supplier engineering and quality at Dell. "While the Committee had identified lithium ion batteries as the next product for standardization, we are going to accelerate our activities now."
Grosso said the IPC Committee will identify any current standards related to lithium ion batteries with the goal of standardizing design, performance and safety requirements for these batteries.
The committee has recently been very active in identifying and working to standardize components vital to the the computer and telecommunications industries. It recently completed a standard for cooling fans, which took less than a year from design to implementation — a remarkable turnaround time for PC standards.
The E-Commerce Times recently quoted Grosso as saying that he expects a similar turnaround time for the battery standard. "We're going to have a standard out on batteries by no later than July 2007," he said.
16 Comments
So something good came out of all these battery recalls. It has forced these companies to take a much harder look at what they're using for batteries.
Wouldn't it be nice if all laptops used say one of three different standard types of batteries. Kind of like how AA batteries are a standard. Then every laptop wouldn't have it's own weird type of battery.
I'd personally like to see a battery-life rating standard across laptop manufacturers. But I don't think that's the focus of this stuff...
i think dell could use the help
i think dell could use the help
Sony. Remember that Apple had some burning, and melting batteries from Sony a while ago.
But standardization should help to bring the price of these expensive batteries down.
It won't prevent manufacturing defects like these though.