UPDATE - Sony Exploding Batteries. New Standards to Be Set by the Victims

Looks like all 'the Sony batteries victims', including Dell, Apple, HP and Lenovo, are gathering next month in San Jose, California, to set new manufacturing and specification standards for notebook and handheld devices batteries, informs X-bit Labs.

All the upper mentioned companies are part of the OEM Critical Components Committee of the IPC-Association Connecting Electronics Industries and have co-developed in the past other critical standards for the industry.

"Standards make things easier on suppliers because they have one set of preferences for how effectively a thing is supposed to perform, it takes you out of the realm of every company having its own individual specification. You also end up with something where there's a lot more technical expertise going into it because you'll have the experience of more than one company participating in making the standard," said IPC, an association connecting electronics industries, vice president of marketing and communications Kimberly Sterling.

Previously, all the dedicated makers and the ones that just use the batteries for their devices were somehow unwilling to set 'universal battery standards' because then they wouldn't have the patent over the new developed standards. "I think things got in the way, like fear of IP (intellectual property). We've just got to realize that we're not talking about IP, we're talking about process control," said John Grosso, Dell's director of supplier engineering and quality, cited by X-bit Labs.

This decision comes two days after Sony's statement regarding the reason behind the exploding batteries. "Sony said in an official statement that the recall arises because, on rare occasions, microscopic metal particles in the recalled battery cells may come into contact with other parts of the battery cell, leading to a short circuit within the cell. Typically, a battery pack will simply power off when a cell short circuit occurs. However, under certain rare conditions, an internal short circuit may lead to cell overheating and potentially flames, the company indicated. The potential for this to occur can be affected by variations in the system configurations found in different notebook computers," previously reported X-bit Labs.