Swollen batteries turning up in some Archos tablets

The same sort of battery problems that have appeared on certain laptops over the past few years are now affecting some tablets. After using the 8- and 10-inch Archos 101 G9 tablets for about a year, we noticed that they no longer sat flat on a desktop, but rocked slightly back and forth, on a back-side bulge.

When we pressed on certain areas of the touch screen, we also noticed some visual distortion. The 10-inch model's touchscreen also generated "phantom" touches—the screen jumped around as though someone were touching it when no one was.

Opening the 8-inch G9 confirmed our suspicion that the problem was swollen batteries:

Archos owners writing on the ArchosFans Forum reported similar bulging problems with their own tablets (search for "bulging" on that site). Unfortunately, most people can't easily open these tablets, and it takes special skills to replace the battery. In addition, the warranty is just a year, which is about when the problem started for our samples.

In light of this problem, Archos should either extend the warranties for its G9 tablets, or follow the lead of Apple, which set up a battery-replacement/software-update program when problematic batteries in its laptops caused swelling.

http://forum.ArchosFans.com [ArchosFans Forum]

Related:
Apple's bloating batteries

—Dean Gallea