Toshiba announced plans to recall 10,000 notebook battery packs due to possible fire hazards.  Even though only 5,100 of the Sony-made batteries are faulty, Toshiba wants to make sure all defective batteries are collected.  The offending batteries were created solely for Toshiba.   

So far, three fire incidents were reported to Toshiba -- one in Australia and two in Japan.  Toshiba spokesman Keisuke Omori said no one was injured in any of the incidents.

A number of companies were forced to recall batteries do to serious safety concerns, highlighted after an IBM ThinkPad burst into flames, along with other reported incidents of fire.  Korean Air and QANTAs temporarily banned the use of Dell and Apple notebooks, regardless of what kind of internal battery was used.

The recalled batteries were manufactured in December 2005 for the following Toshiba notebook products:  Dynabook, Dynabook Satellite, Satellite and the Tecra -- and were available in the U.S., Japan, Europe, China and Australia.

Sony finally turned over as many as 9.6 million batteries used by a number of different notebook manufacturers.  The cost of recalling and replacing all of the batteries should be minuscule compared to the large recalls that took place last year.