While perhaps not the 'smoking laptop' (couldn't resist the pun) that proves Lenovo's laptop battery-charging technology is no longer superior to Dell and Apple's laptops, it does beg the question: how many Lenovo laptops will go up in flames? For a company that painted itself as being immune to such problems (it basically claimed its technology had a kind of failsafe that detected if the battery would be charging too much and therefore avoid this) and displaying great confidence regarding it, its investigators sure got to LAX to check this out in a hurry:
It will be curious to see how this plays out, although it is also curious how Lenovo is trying to palm this off on a user possibly choosing to use another battery, when Lenovo in general and this laptop in particular was identified as using the same stock Sony battery responsible for the Apple and Dell recalls. Also, for a company that appeared supremely confident of its technology and product, how many people noticed new U.S. television commercials for Lenovo? In recent years (e.g. after the Ford and Bridgestone safety debacle), companies generally begin to spend incredible quantities of money on airtime'”usually trying to change their image (because of past trouble)'”rather than the traditional stand-by of using airtime to market a new product. While Lenovo's timing corresponds to the same time period of the Apple and Dell recalls, it is unclear what Lenovo's real reasons were for their advertising. That aside, it will be interesting to discover the outcome of this particular case, as well as to see if Lenovo suffers more of these incidents.
Source: Cnet
