Sony says battery burn-out probe should have been quicker

Sony has admitted it could have moved "more quickly" to tackle the burning battery bug that hit two of the company's biggest power-pack customers, Dell and Apple, and prompted many others to recall Sony-made lithium-ion batteries-- sony vgp-bps2c , vgp-bps2b ,vgp-bpl2c , vgp-bps2a .

In an interview with Japanese-language newspaper the Mainchi Shimbun, relayed by Agence France-Presse, Sony President Ryoji Chubachi is quoted as saying: "The company should have investigated the cause of the battery problem more quickly."

Chubachi also hinted that the sony battery issue may have arisen from Sony's rush to deliver higher-capacity notebook power packs. "We had troubles as we tried to meet the demands for larger battery capacity," he confessed, the paper said.

In October, Sony set aside ￥51.2bn ($444m/£224m/€334m) to cover a worldwide recall of almost 10m lithium-ion laptop batteries . Following a spate of exploding laptop incidents, Dell announced its own battery recall this summer, and was quickly followed by Apple and Lenovo.

They pointed the finger at Sony-made batteries as the cause of the combustion, and in September Sony's battery division said it would support these and other laptop vendors who chose to instigate recalls.Sony vgp-bps2c, Gateway, Fujitsu, Sharp, Hitachi, Toshiba and Sony's own Vaio division subsequently asked some of their customers to return Sony-made batteries.