Trackball from Hell: BlackBerry Tour has 50% Return Rate?
Little did I know yesterday, when I wrote about my trackball failure on my BlackBerry Tour, that today there would be a story floating around that over 50% of the Tours purchased by Sprint customers have been returned due to trackball issues.
Electronista is reporting today that cell phone carrier Sprint has reported that over 50% of it’s Tour have been returned due to trackball failure. According to the story, the failure results from the trackball clogging quickly and needing to be cleaned.
Now the part where the story becomes strange though is when reportedly, Verizon is “angry” enough over the trackball issue that they are going to start shifting smartphone sales to Motorola’s Android phones. Really? Honestly that is a really hard pill to swallow considering the success Verizon has had with BlackBerry sales over the years. It’s highly unlikely that they would shift away from them over a trackball issue.
I especially like how they tie a known fact into the story (RIM going to trackpads) and use it as more evidence of a defective trackball.
I do know that there have been a lot of complaints about the Tour trackball, but I am very dubious about the 50% figure and even less concerned about a possible move by Verizon away from BlackBerry sales.
What are your thoughts?
[source: Electronista]
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Actually the 50% return rate makes total sense given the fact that rim has declared that there is an issue affecting approx 50% of the devices. However this is not a mere cleaning issue but is in fact a software issue that should be corrected in the sw launch that iis said to be ready within 30 days or less. As far as verizon goes the blackberrys are one of their top sellers. The curve in fact has had more sales then the iphone! all trackballs by design will need to be cleaned and more so if you wear lotion, work around dust or even have sweaty hands lol. Think of It as an original ball mouse. They had to be cleaned periodically with an alcohol wipe and so do these. Anywho that’s my blackberry 101 lol.
Hi Srsulli, very good points. Did you see the followup to this article? http://www.mobimadness.com/analyst-who-wrote-tour-50-defective-must-be-glue-sniffer/
I get the feeling this researchers control group was a bunch of guys and girls he interviewed outside of Starbucks.