Nokia to Replace 43 Million Batteries

mysqlbytes writes "According to a recent post on the BBC's website, Nokia has admitted to a problem in the BL-5C batteries made by Matsushita between December 2005 and November 2006. For some of us, it means longer battery life with a new lease of life and for some of us, no more burnt legs. You can check out the product advisory here."

Re:Forty. Three. Million.

[timmarhy]

hardly. It's not your fault, but most people have a lot of trouble comprehending large numbers of things. I'd guess nokia will simply have all their dealers as collection sites, and have them send the boxes back to them where they will scan the bar code on the battery to mark it as returned and then ship the batteries off to a scrap metal recycler. 43 million would amount to a couple of road train loads.

i'd be suprised if there was significant labour invovled in the process.

Re:Burnt Legs?

[Anonymous Coward]

I wonder seriously about this. I put in the code from the back of my battery and the site cheerfully informed me, "Your battery may be replaced". Great, I thought. I'll just pop in my contact info and they'll mail me a new one. Great, right??

Uhm...next page says, "Your battery will NOT be replaced". Think they coulda told me that BEFORE I put in my contact (marketing) info?

I smell a scam here. Or at least, scummy tactics.

Re:Substitute "Dealerships" for "Workers".

[jombeewoof]

But you're assuming 8 hour days, that's only 12 or so batteries an hour.

I think it would be more like 1000 dealers doing at least 25 batteries an hour, for 11 hours a day 7 days a week.

I'm too lazy to do the math, but it's a less than 86 weeks. It still is an incredible amount of labor, but at $9 an hour at the very best it's not really all that much money, they'll hire an extra worker or 2 in each shop it's not all that much in the grand scheme of things.

*disclaimer.
all numbers pulled out of nowhere, and probably mean next to nothing.

Risky business

[Taagehornet]

I bet Nokia's rather happy they didn't solder the battery onto the board, but opted for the replaceable solution.

Considering that every month brings with it a new story of a major hardware manufacturer having to recall xx million devices due to faulty batteries, I'm impressed that Apple had the guts to go for non-replaceables.