Uh-oh. This doesn’t bode well for Sony Ericsson….
The SE Satio, purported to be a big-hitter in the touchscreen/smartphone/cameraphone space, has been pulled from sale by Carphone Warehouse, and Phones4U in the UK. Given they are (arguably) the two biggest independent high street chains for Mobile devices, that’s a MAJOR problem for the embattled handset maker.
The vague, and frankly somewhat annoying, explanation of “software issues” is apparently to blame – something that many of us, as smartphone owners, will have experienced at one time or another. In actual fact, what they are referring to is a handset that most likely either crashes or locks when certain actions (e.g. opening an app) are performed on it.
However, usually for handsets to get pulled, these software issues have to be consistently bad, and repeatable – along the scale of say, a handset that persistently restarts when you try and make a call on it (yes, that’s happened before on other devices I’ve tried). So we can assume that for affected handsets, there’s a bug that ain’t going away, and that is going to frustrate users a great deal.
Interestingly, as well being for sale in independent retail channels, the device also got ranged with Vodafone, 3, and Orange – none of whom are apparently considering pulling the Satio. Vodafones view is that it has an Operator-variant of the device which has been tested extensively, and therefore doesn’t have the same issues. Anecdotally, the Satio that I had, which was on the 3 network, didn’t have any issues either – actually, it was very good!
Apparently SE is coming with a software update that is going to fix the issue within the next few days.
[Via: Mobiletoday.co.uk]