Cell phone batteries made in China may explode, regulators say
sagawaeas...@yahoo.com
July 08, 2007
Cell phone batteries made in China may explode, regulators say
Defective products - Motorola and Nokia deny links to the problem
batteries
DAVID BARBOZA
After concerns over pet food, toothpaste, seafood and defective tires,
China may now have to cope with another consumer product disaster:
exploding mobile phone batteries.
Chinese regulators in southern Guangdong province, one of the world's
biggest electronics manufacturing centers, said this week that they
had found Motorola and Nokia mobile phone batteries that failed safety
tests and were prone to explode under certain conditions.
The batteries were said to be manufactured by Motorola and Sanyo of
Japan's Beijing operation, and were being distributed by companies
based in Guangdong province, which is near Hong Kong and is one of
China's biggest export centers.
It is unclear whether any of the substandard and hazardous batteries
entered the export market.
The announcement came just a day after China's state-controlled news
media reported that in June a 22-year-old man in western China was
killed after his Motorola cell phone exploded in his shirt pocket.
The man was reportedly a welder and the heat associated with the job
may have touched off the explosion.
Motorola and Nokia, two of the world's biggest mobile phone makers,
immediately denied links to the distributors of the problem batteries,
suggesting they were counterfeit.
"All the batteries tested were not Motorola genuine batteries," said
Yang Bo-ning, a spokesman for Motorola in Beijing. "They were fakes.
Those companies are not our suppliers."
Nokia said it was investigating the case and trying to determine
whether any of the substandard batteries affected Nokia phones.
Nokia said it doesn't manufacture batteries in China and has no
business ties with the Chinese distributors named in the safety
tests.
"We are confident this is a counterfeit product," said Eija-Riitta
Huovinen, a Nokia spokeswoman in Finland.
But the discovery of the exploding batteries is already threatening to
turn into another consumer product nightmare, and helping fuel
mounting international concerns about the quality and safety of goods
being made in China.
Exports of tainted pet food ingredients earlier this year triggered
one of the biggest pet food recalls in U.S. history, possibly killing
or injuring as many as 4,000 cats and dogs, according to American
regulators.
Cough medicine laced with a mislabeled industrial chemical from China
called diethylene glycol may have killed as many as 100 people in the
Dominican Republic last year.
And a few weeks ago, an American company recalled about 450,000
Chinese-made tires because they did not contain a key safety feature,
which could prevent tire treads from splitting and falling apart.
The recall occurred after a lawsuit blamed the Chinese-made tires for
an accident that resulted in the death of two people in the United
States.
Al Bundy
Perhaps the batteries were merely mislabeled fireworks! It was all a
misunderstanding.
Sheldon
<sagawaeas...@yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:1183905071.3...@k79g2000hse.googlegroups.com...
the IBM computer I'm typing this message on.
ulti...@hotmail.com
> <sagawaeasdgsdaa...@yahoo.com> wrote in message
Scary. These days "American made" carries the same quaintness as the
old fashioned general
store in Podunk, Illinois.
Here's a video of a Lithium-ion battery going up inside of a laptop.
I imagine the phone batteries aren't much
different:
Bucky
> Cell phone batteries made in China may explode, regulators say
so can Sony laptop batteries (which I assume are made in Japan)
Chois...@search.aol.com
news:1183929896.4...@57g2000hsv.googlegroups.com:
> Perhaps the batteries were merely mislabeled fireworks! It was all a
> misunderstanding.
islamic terrorist cells have overrun chinese corporate offices.
Chois...@search.aol.com
news:1183955891.7...@i13g2000prf.googlegroups.com:
> Scary. These days "American made" carries the same quaintness as the
> old fashioned general
> store in Podunk, Illinois.
>
> Here's a video of a Lithium-ion battery going up inside of a laptop.
> I imagine the phone batteries aren't much
> different:
>
> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WeWq6rWzCh
when chinese batteris are outlawed, only outlaws will have chinese batteries
otoh, maybe we should airdrop crappy cell phones over baghdad. that would screw up
those ied's.