The Chinese PC assembler, Lenovo, has issued a recall for 80,000 ThinkPad X1 Carbon laptops sold between November 2016 and December 2017.
ThinkPad X1 Carbon laptops were sold with batteries that were technically compromised at the assembly line. To be poetic, let’s call it a manufacturing ‘prank’; unfastened screw was left dangerously burgeoning between the battery and casing.
During usage, as the battery heats up, expands and begs for more space, it punctures the battery and, boom, the battery’s stored energy escapes into freedom.
In a worst case scenario, the blast can cause a fire and injure the unsuspecting user. Fortunately, no case of explosion has been reported; so far batteries overheated and fried the intestines of the laptop. What does this remind you of ?
Of course, Samsung Galaxy Note 7 back in 2016. The infamous flagship phone had two battery issues that turned the otherwise gold brand product into some Boko Haram suicide bomber.
The first set of batteries for Note 7 were slightly too big for the real estate provided for inside the phone and were in essence squeezed in. Some injudicious engineer overlooked some property of batteries; they expand after extensive usage and need a breather.
And the inevitable happened. The second set of batteries were wrongly welded to the phone causing a peel off that caused a circuit short.
Lenovo sold 78,000 such laptops in USA and additional 5,500 in Canada. The company is not sure if all that lot has screw issues. Just to be too sure, Lenovo is recalling all these laptops.
Have you noticed the advertising entertainment by telephone carriers on 4G/LTE and 4.5G/LTE data? I must submit to you that TNM’s “kodi usamuka liti?” is not only artistic but so emotionally loaded that it evokes multiple meanings.
While the 4G buzz air environs us locally, internationally, the story is different. News about deployment of a new kid on the block, 5G, looms in the horizon of the western world.
Qualcomm has announced the introduction of X50, 5G modem. Companies such as AT&T, British Telecom, China Telecom, China Mobile, China Unicom, Deutsche Telecom, Sprint, Telstra and Verizon have deployed Qualcomm X50 in 5G network trials.
Let us put things into prospective, TNM or Airtel 4G MiFi Wi-Fi outdoor router connects to the internet super highways at 150 megabits per second. At that speed, YouTube movies play as seamlessly as though they were residing on the local drive.
5G model, for lack of a better term, cruises at 10,240 megabits per second. In English, 68 times better than MiFi. To Americanise it; you ain’t seen nothing yet.
And one more thing, iPhone X has been reported with a 6-8 seconds lag before a call can be answered. In extreme cases, the lag can be as long as 10 seconds. There are times when calls are completely missed as the phone refuses to wake up and display the unlock controls when a call beeps.
At first, there was the issue of the gadget refusing do anything under extreme low temperatures. Now, here we are. Recently, Apple cut iPhone X production in response to weak demand.
With Samsung Galaxy S9 launch less than two weeks away, the situation may douse iPhone X’s popularity. However, Took Cook and his team have said that these issues will wane with a patch of iOS system software.
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