Toshiba has joined Dell and Apple, and asked its customers to send back their Sony-made laptop batteries currently sitting in Dynabook and Satellite machines. The notebook maker's recall extends to some 340,000 customers worldwide.

The recall does not appear to have been formally announced - details of the programme come via an Associated Press report coming out of Tokyo. Crucially, there's no indication that any Toshiba notebooks have undergone spontaneously combustion the way a number of Dell and Apple machines have. A company spokesman stressed the Toshiba recall was not related to those initiated by Dell and Apple.

The Toshiba recall extends only to computers manufactured between March and May this year, hence the relatively small number of machines affected. In July, Apple asked MacBook Pro users to return their batteries, claiming the power cells shipped with the notebooks did not meet its performance specifications, and it appears Toshiba's recall has been prompted by a similar problem.

In August this year, Apple recalled a whole heap of older, Sony-made batteries - 1.8m of them - that shipped with PowerBook and iBook machines sold between October 2003 and August 2006. Apple's second recall of the year followed Dell's demand that 4.1m of its notebook users return their batteries. ®