At the beginning of this week, Dell issued the recall of 4.1 million laptop batteries, the biggest recall in the companies's 22 year history. But this could be bigger than just Dell, as the lithium-ion batteries themselves are manufactured by Sony, the world's second biggest battery manufacturer.

Other companies that use batteries made by Sony include Gateway, Hewlett-Packard and Lenovo and Apple, and potentially all these manufacturers could experience the same issues with their batteries; however, this seems unlikely at the moment. So far representatives from Gateway, Hewlett-Packard and Lenovo all said that the batteries used in their companies' computers did not manifest the same problems as those found in Dells. Meanwhile, Apple is still investigating to ensure that the batteries they use are fully exempt of any such problems. So far it seems unlikely that the problem will affect other manufacturers as even Sony themselves use their own batteries and have not experienced the issues.

It seems that the Dell portables and their batteries are an explosive combination for some reason, but that reason has so far been difficult to pinpoint as there are many variables involved. It could very well be that other manufactures start seeing these problems over time, as Dell argues that it was the first to adopt these cells from Sony. Indeed, this could be the case, as from the hundreds of millions of battery packs in question that were shipped, the number of incidents has been minor. However, both companies are looking into it to make sure that there are no risks to the consumer.